In memoriam: Atefeh Rajabi - murdered by the Iranian judiciary

(Most of this is borrowed from the Telegraph article  Death and the maiden in Iran, July 2004.)
Atefeh Rajabi appears to have been a fairly normal 16-year-old, but with an unfortunately bad family background. She was probably sulky, disobedient, and eager to have sex. In London, those attributes could earn lectures from parents and teachers on the importance of acting responsibly and not being offensive.
In the city of Neka in Iran, where Atefeh Rajabi came from, they got her hauled up in front of a judge, where she was charged and found guilty of "acts incompatible with chastity". The judge in the Islamic Sharia court ruled that the appropriate penalty was death. Her sentence was confirmed by Iran's Supreme Court.
The justice machine of Iran having thus run its proper course, on 15th August, 2004, the girl was hung from a crane in the main square of Neka, in full public view, in order to keep "society safe from acts against public morality", and her young, insignificant life was snuffed out.

Girl, Interrupted - in memory of Aqsa Parvez, plot #774

On December 10, 2007, a 16-year old girl Aqsa Parvez was murdered - by her Pakistani immigrant Muslim father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas Parvez, in what is euphemistically termed an Islamic "honour killing".  The cause of death was strangulation.

Sweet 16: more than 20 Facebook pages devoted to
Aqsa Parvez were created within days of her death.Image credit: Facebook.

But this didn't happen in Pakistan, it happened in Mississauga, Toronto (Canada), where the population has tripled in the past 30 years - there are currently more than 700,000 people living in this, the country’s sixth largest city, and half of them are visible minorities.

Provocation for the father to murder his daughter must have been profound - he had sworn to kill her - because she had abandoned the use of her hijab (headscarf) - which is apparently a sin according to the Koran (and under Islamic Sharia law).

The otherwise unmarked grave of Aqsa Parvez, in Plot #774.

The details and the background to the murder of this child (she was aged 16) are adequately described in a factual and unemotional  4-page article by Toronto Life (click on link).


As if the murder wasn't bad enough, there is an article on 22 January, 2009 in Jihad Watch, that describes how Aqsa was buried without a headstone - she was laid in an unmarked grave, in plot #774 in Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ontario. One Pamela Geller took up a collection to raise funds for a headstone, and a group of infidels contributed sufficient to make it a goer. But there was a problem, according to Pamela Geller in the article:

Take care when you are out cycling in Paris

"Angles Morts" in French literally menas "deadly angles", but "blind spots" is probably a more correct interpretation. The angles morts are the blind spots radiating out from cars and trucks. Cyclists are not visible if they are in these blind spots, and when vehicles are turning, cyclists run a very high risk of getting killed by the vehicle in question. That is why "Angles Morts" is the name of this 8-minute long YouTube video clip, which looks like it was composed of many takes of the dangers for cyclists on Parisian roads and especially the bicycle lanes. A fascinating vid, and in my opinion well worth a watch.

Thanks to the blog site Do You Vélo?

Confronting the unpleasant sight of what we are

Men of Hindu Dalit caste removing raw sewage by hand.

Whilst archiving some old notes, I came across this BBC news item from 2006: "IT giant [HP] faces India legal action".

Reading this reminded me that the same hi-tech area in Bangalore as was mentioned in the article was also mentioned in another article about India from the BBC: "Bangalore's 'night soil' collectors". These "collectors" are from the absolute lowest Hindu cast - the Dalits (untouchables) - and have the primary job of manually moving shit out of cesspits, at night-time - presumably because at night-time there is nobody of a higher caste - and who probably made the shit in the first place - to see/smell and be offended by this activity.

The latter article not only provides a scatalogical angle, but also room for some serious thought by us.

If you read the latter article, you will see that, interestingly, they call it "night soil" - and apparently not because the shit collectors (Dalits) work on this unpleasant job only at night-time. For example, I read a separate report about Indian "ecological" public toilets, where they referred to the shit not as "shit", or "excrement", or "sewage", or even "waste", but as "night soil", so not only is it just a euphemism for shit, but it also suggests that the people that produce the shit only produce it at night-time.

Burakumin - are the Japanese still uncivilised?

Skeletons from the mass graves of the Nanking massacre victims, uncovered.

I read this fascinating post in Slashdot today - Google Earth Raises Discrimination Issue In Japan
- which says:

"The Times (UK) reports that by allowing old maps to be overlaid on satellite images of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, Google has unwittingly created a visual tool that has prolonged an ancient discrimination, says a lobbying group established to protect the human rights of three million burakumin, members of the sub-class condemned by the old feudal system in Japan to unclean jobs associated with death and dirt. 'We tend to think of maps as factual, like a satellite picture, but maps are never neutral, they always have a certain point of view,' says David Rumsey, a US map collector. Some Japanese companies actively screen out burakumin-linked job seekers, and some families hire private investigators to dig into the ancestry of fiances to make sure there is no burakumin taint. Because there is nothing physical to differentiate burakumin from other Japanese and because there are no clues in their names or accent, the only way of establishing whether or not they are burakumin is by tracing their family. By publishing the locations of burakumin ghettos with the modern street maps, the quest to trace ancestry is made easier, says Toru Matsuoka, an opposition MP and member of the Buraku Liberation League. Under pressure to diffuse criticism, Google has asked the owners of the woodblock print maps to remove the legend that identifies the ghetto with an old term, extremely offensive in modern usage, that translates loosely as 'scum town.' 'We had not acknowledged the seriousness of the map, but we do take this matter seriously,' says Yoshito Funabashi, a Google spokesman." The ancient Japanese caste system was made illegal 150 years ago, but silent discrimination remains. The issue is complicated by allegations of mob connections in the burakumin anti-discrimination organizations."

Corruption in the House

UK Westminster.

New Zealand Beehive and Parliament Building.

On the same day as news reports are published disclosing further irregularities over British MPs' expenses rorts (e.g., Expenses row over MPs' second homes), there is this interesting news report about the restitution of ill-gotten gains - Crime boss's luxuries up for sale.

However, the news reports do not attempt to relate these items to each other or a third (the Damian Green fiasco) and a fourth item (the "Cash/loans for Honours" scandal) of past news. In case anyone does not see some some common threads here, I shall expand on this.

I visited the Sistene Chapel

Today I went and had a quick tour around the Sistene Chapel. I took this picture:

OK, it's not really a photo - it's actually a screenshot from a "virtual tour", via here.

What a beautiful thing to publish on the Internet! However, be warned - you might need to take care if you get dizzy easily. I rapidly got motion sickness by turning the viewpoint around whilst playing and looking at this.
About using this virtual tour:

My second Trek SL1000bicycle!

I recently bought a second Trek SL1000 with a 58cm frame (see picture to right) - I bought it second-hand via TradeMe for NZ$650. This 2nd one has a blue/white finish, whereas my 1st one is black/white.

The reason for getting the secod one is that I can now have one bike in Wellington (where I am working at present) and one in Auckland (my home base).
So I can keep my fitness/fatness levels in relatively healthy shape, regardless of which city I happen to be in.

Mickey Mouse teaching the Palestinian children to hate

I sent my old school-mate and friend Harold (he's Jewish) the following photo of two Israeli girls signing artillery shells, noting that the Americans used to sign "To Adolf with love" on bombs, or similar, during WW2.


I often wondered what this practice of signing warplanes or bombs said about the Yanks, when I saw pictures of this practice in photos from WW2. I feel sure the US probably repeated the practice in wars over Kuwait/Afghanistan/Iraq.

Harold reckoned that the two girls would not have easy access to an Air Force base, and that self-propelled artillery pieces could have been parked on these kids' doorsteps - many Israeli towns and villages being quite close to various borders. He thought that this photo dated from the last Lebanese War with Hizbullah, as the name of the gentleman to whom the kids are sending regards is/was a Hizbullah leader. The kids up north were showered with hundreds of missiles in a few short days and spent long hours cooped up in bomb shelters.

Not having a name for it, I called the practice "hate-signing". It was - and probably still is - a useful practice for soldiers, because it accelerates a necessary military conditioning process - the process of abstraction and dehumanisation of the enemy. The more one can separate any feeling of common identity with the enemy as fellow human beings, the more one can engage in abstraction, and thus the easier it is to dissociate from the enemy, and the easier it is to kill them without compunction - they are not really "human" after all. That is one reason why the current form of automated warfare is so effective. Pressing a button and seeing the ensuing destruction of night-vision blobs on a computer screen is easy - a bit like a computer game - and not at all like standing face-to-face with, and killing a fellow human being by your own direct and deliberate action.

I think hate-signing must do something inside the heads of those children, and I suspect that it may not necessarily be a good something. My mother would probably have reckoned that this sort of thing was stooping to the level of an unworthy opponent - which, as she pointed out to me as a child, intrinsically detracts from one's own self-integrity and higher principles. We know that Muslims condition their children from as early as the age of 6 to learn by rote to hate "unbelievers" - especially Jews - as being less than human in Allah's eye. Is that any good reason for emulating the enemy by conditioning one's own children similarly?
Even if it were "necessary", I would still have real concerns about it - it goes against the principle of respect for life.

Harold didn't disagree, with me. He reckoned that this was probably one way some misguided adults were trying to relieve the tension for these kids. He did not condone this behaviour, but - probably to give it some balance - he thought it was a little less insidious than the Hamas videos of 3 year-olds being conditioned to want to be suicide bombers, and Mickey Mouse characters on Palestinian pre-school TV programmes encouraging them to do so, as the heartwarming YouTube video clip below shows:

Political Correctness gone mad - a Limey's rant

(My friend Robert, in the UK sent me this excellent rant email. That's the Robertson's jam Golly on the right, by the way.)
Am I right in thinking that PAKI is short for Pakistani? Just an abbreviation?

Prince Harry calls a mate "Our little Paki friend" and is forced to apologise two years later. This guy was a mate of his for heavens sake!

Am I right in thinking that "Brit" is short for British? Should the Sun newspaper be forced to apologise every time it prints the word Brit or The Brits are Coming? Is the word Brit offensive?

Is "Scot" offensive? "The Scots are coming". Another Sun Newspaper Football Clash Headline classic.

What about Ozzie? Kiwi? Pommie? Limey? Where or when will this lunacy end? The Cornish call all holiday makers "Grockles". Is there anything wrong with that?

If a Pakistani called you "His Brit friend" would you feel offended? Would you demand an apology on national TV ? Of course not.

Reference is made to the "Paki Shop" in one episode of Only Fools and Horses (now overdubbed for UK Gold broadcasting with the offending word taken out). (The episode when they build a nuclear fall-out shelter).

Should Sir David Jason now apologise? Should the writer John Sullivan apologise? Should the BBC apologise?

What about the Fuzzywuzzies (in "Dads Army") ?
What about "You stupid Kraut"? (in Fawlty Towers) ?

Both are still being broadcast regularly with no overdub.

The supreme idiots are at it again trying to stir up racial hatred. It's just madness surely?

I'm happy being a BRIT, BRITISH, ENGLISH, POMMIE BASTARD, LIMEY or whatever. I don't care a fig.
I only care when I'm called a racist.

There's something rotten in the barrel. To all those guilty of this stupid nonsense in government, local politics or anywhere else we all say "GROW UP THE LOT OF YOU".

If you agree, pass this on.

If not then you still have the democratic right to delete it (well for the time being, anyway).

An incredible breath of fresh air for Palestine

H.G.Wells once wrote about our state of being "prisoned from the cradle to the grave", in the story "The History of Mr.Polly":

But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I give these things as facts and information, and with no moral intimations. And Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed indigestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and a general air of inevitableness about his situation, saw through it, understood there was no inevitable any more, and escaped his former despair.

So, now read this:
To my Arab brothers: The War with Israel Is Over - and they won. Now let's finally move forward
By Youssef M. Ibrahim
From: JewishWorldReview.com
With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:
The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

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	Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent and Wall Street Journal Energy Editor for 25 years, is a freelance writer based in New York City and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Comment by clicking here.

Daft Kiwi copyright law could be adopted

Update 2009/04/04: This proposed legislation has now been thrown out, following a huge protest. The Creative Freedom Foundation NZ contributed a lot to mustering support amongst citizens, who asked their MPs to vote against the thing. Another failed attempt to reduce our lawful and democratic rights.
___________________________________________
The Enquirer article here has a link to a site to protest this proposed law:
The Creative Freedom Foundation NZ
I have just written to Helen Clark, Labour MP and ex-PM, regarding this.
______________________________________________________

Dear Ms Clark,
I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms regarding this proposed legislation, which appears to be being forced through approval at the behest of interested commercial lobbyists, and against the interests of people's democratic rights, freedom and liberty.

The government appears set to adopt a daft, draconian copyright infringement law next month, which will see Internet users summarily disconnected merely upon accusation that they've unlawfully shared copyrighted files, with no proof, due process or right of appeal involved.

Termed Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act, this outrageous Kiwi legislation makes the assumption that any Internet user in the country accused of copyright infringement will automatically be deemed guilty. Just the allegation requires that their ISP disconnect them.

Instigated at the behest of the RIANZ, New Zealand's Big Music MAFIAA analogue of the US-based RIAA, the law is currently scheduled to be put into force at the end of February 2009.

Any "Guilt upon accusation" law would be fundamentally wrong. Western democracy, freedom, liberty and law thrives - amongst other things - on a robust declaration about due process in the proving of guilt.

If this law is approved, then it would presage the further progressive reduction of people's democratic rights, freedom and liberty.

______________________________________________________

Tough love versus spanking - a good example

Some countries (e.g., New Zealand) have now legislated to make it illegal to physically punish a child (e.g., spanking, slapping). Even without such legislation, parents are increasingly coming to terms with the very real possibility that it is not proper - that, indeed it may be harmful - to smack children. So, I have tried other methods to control my kids when they have one of "those moments" which can oftentime drive a parent to feel like giving the brat a belt around the earhole. Tough love is the answer. One method that I have found particularly effective is for me to just take the child out for a car ride.

Amazing as it may sound, this never fails. Whether it's the fact that it takes the child away from the disturbed environment where some upset has occurred, and gives them time to reflect, or whether it's the vibration from the car, or the time away from any distractions such as TV, video games, computer, IPod, etc., I don't know, but it always works. My kids usually calm down and stop misbehaving after our car ride together. Eye to eye contact helps a lot too.

I've included a photo below of one of my sessions with my son, in case you would like to use the same technique.

Happy days.

"Our people are our greatest asset" - a hypocritical lie

Clearly this phrase is a classic example of hypocrisy, and an absolute lie, because nobody in their right minds would treat their assets like most companies seem to treat their people - in fact are often obliged to do - to maximise profitability for the shareholders. The film "The Corporation" explains this, and other things, that Corporations do - they are let loose as legal psychopaths in our society.


So, for an example, take a look at Proletar's collection of what HP employees think about their employer. An HP employee sent me the link. Until I read these comments, I had not realised that the company was so completely screwed up and morale so broken. What had previusly been a preferred IT employer, with very good employee relations and benefits, would seem to have been turned around in a relatively short space of time into just another people-mashing mill. What a pity.


"Our people are our greatest asset": There is usually an English word or phrase to describe almost anything you might come across in this world, yet "a hypocritical lie" does not seem to quite do the phrase justice. It is such an outlandish piece of management bullshit that it beggars belief that managers still trot it out as if they believe it and as if we are expected to believe it. "Everything is perception" these weasel-worded people will declare, if you challenge the statement. So, reluctant to seem foolish, whenever the phrase is uttered, we will sit and silently listen in mute acceptance of the fact that the Emperor has no clothes - taking up the role of deserving victims if we fail to decry the use of the phrase whenever it is uttered.


When questioned by the senate committee set up to investigate how the recent credit crunch ("economic collapse") came about, which was brought on by the banks' risky over-indebtedness, Greenspan said "I realised that my ideology was flawed". His ideology apparently had not accounted for the possibility that corporate bosses would act out of selfish greed and risk the security of the corporations that they headed up.


There is a profound social problem here. That people trot out this garbage phrase is bad enough, but the garbage is not the problem - it is a symptom of a problem. The problem is in the Corporations that we have allowed to become so powerful in our society that they literally take over control of our freedom, liberty and livelihoods. We have allowed ourselves to become enslaved to an ideology called corporatism. It is no less enslaving (arguably more), or demanding than Islamism - which is just another ideology. Though we may not fully realise it, 1984 would seem to be in place in the here and now - in a more insidious and embedded systemic form than George Orwell had conceived when he wrote his book.

El camimo del Ray - scary disused walkway

Watching this video made my fingers ache (a fear reaction that I experience when at great heights).
View it yourself. No wonder this vid has had over 6 million viewings.