Brutal-Koala-Jedi-Action seemed relevant to this post

Ken Eakins writes on Sitting Now:

Here we go again …

The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.

But online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia said trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the “Streisand” effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt.

Once again ED is attacked, and once again people miss the point of the site.

The Internet really is srs bsns.

(more @ Sydney Herald)

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

[Read more for ScienceBlogs.com]

Constance McMillen didn’t believe her Mississippi school district would really call off her senior prom rather than allow her to show up with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo. On Thursday, a day after the Itawamba County school board did just that, the 18-year-old lesbian high school senior reluctantly returned to campus to some unfriendly looks, she said.

“Somebody said, ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year.’” McMillen said.

The district announced Wednesday it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom. The decision came after the American Civil Liberties Union demanded that officials change a policy banning same-sex prom dates because it violated students’ rights. And the ACLU said the district not letting McMillen wear a tuxedo violated her free expression rights.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford to force the school district to sponsor the prom and allow McMillen to bring whom she chooses and wear what she wants.

District officials didn’t returned numerous calls left by The Associated Press seeking comment on Thursday.

McMillen said she never expected the district to respond the way it did.

“A lot of people said that was going to happen, but I said, they had already spent too much money on the prom” to cancel it, she said. “I’m just trying to get done what I originally wanted done. Now, we’re having to fight just to have a prom.”

McMillen said she didn’t want to go back to Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton the morning after the decision, but her father told her she needed to face her classmates, teachers and school officials.

“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.”

A school board statement said it wouldn’t host the event in Fulton, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events” but never mentioned McMillen or her girlfriend, who also is a student at the school.

[Read more at Yahoo News]

So how much pot do Californians smoke?

According to a recent state board of equalization report prepared for the legislature, it’s 16 million ounces a year. That’s a little less than one-half an ounce for each resident in California, in case you’re counting every man, woman and child.

The analysis was prepared for legislation by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), that seeks to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana for use by California adults 21 and over.

Some other findings:

• California is America’s top pot producing state, with an annual yield of 8.6 million pounds of weed valued at $13.8 billion. That’s more than one-third of the cultivation across the U.S.

[Read more at the Sacramento Bee]

In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.

Around her, the other Voodoo worshippers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.

In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead – one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps – and is thus, in a way, blessed.

When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.

Instead they embrace her, even kiss her. And in that way they are blessed, too.

But for all the fervor and favor being shared in this back-alley corner of Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that was badly smashed in the quake, the practitioners of Voodoo are feeling under seige.

Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations – evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Baptists – as the cause of God’s anger in smiting their country.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

Secretary Clinton’s recent speech on Internet Freedom has signaled a strong interest from the US State Department in promoting the use of the internet to promote political reforms in closed societies. It makes sense that the State Department would look to support existing projects to circumvent internet censorship. The New York Times reports that a group of senators is urging the Secretary to apply existing funding to support the development and expansion of censorship circumvention programs, including Tor, Psiphon and Freegate.

I’ve spent a good part of the last couple of years studying internet circumvention systems. My colleagues Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I released a study last year that compared the strengths and weaknesses of different circumvention tools. Some of my work at Berkman is funded by a US state department grant that focuses on continuing to study and evaluate these sorts of tools and I spend a lot of time trying to coordinate efforts between tool developers and people who need access to circumvention tools to publish sensitive content.

I strongly believe that we need strong, anonymized and useable censorship circumvention tools. But I also believe that we need lots more than censorship circumvention tools, and I fear that both funders and technologists may overfocus on this one particular aspect of internet freedom at the expense of other avenues. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies.

So here’s a provocation: We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.

[Read more at Worldchanging.com]

The Raw Story:

The American Civil Liberties Union has never treated the Obama administration with kid gloves, but with their latest ad buy it’s become increasingly clear that their patience for the continuance of some Bush-era policies has run quite thin.”What will it be Mr. President?” the ACLU asks in a full-page New York Times advertisement published Sunday. “Change or more of the Same?” The ad also features a portrait of Obama that morphs into Bush.

The ACLU’s images of the subtle transition between presidents is filtered and lacking in detail, and spans just four frames. However, it appears to be a take-off of a protest image that circulated Facebook and some progressive blogs late last year, showing a similar transition in eerie detail.

The ACLU’s full-size advertisement is below this text.

The ad specifically pressured the administration to hold fast to their decision to try the alleged 9/11 plotters in the judicial system and not by military tribunal as many Obama opponents have called for.

[Read more at The Raw Story]

A Fallujah mother holds her little girl, who was born without a left forearm and hand.

A high number of children are being born with birth defects in an Iraqi city where U.S. forces may have used chemical weapons during a fierce battle in 2004.

Children in Fallujah are being born with limb, head, heart and nervous system defects.

There is even a claim that a baby was born with three heads. The number of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than the rate in Europe.

The city, 40 miles west of Baghdad, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Iraq war in late 2004. U.S. Marines led Operation Phantom Fury to recapture it from insurgents.

British troops were involved in manning checkpoints on the outskirts of the city as the Americans went in. The U.S. has admitted that it used white phosphorus in the attack, but only as an illumination device.

Read more: Daily Mail:

Children in Afghanistan are more likely to die before the age of five than children anywhere else in the world, according to Save the Children.

At the current appalling rate, one child dies every two minutes in the violence-wracked nation. The study shows that last year was also the deadliest for Afghan children since the fall of the Taliban.

More than 1,050 were killed in suicide attacks, air strikes, explosions and crossfire, according to latest figures. Save the Children insists the true scale of the humanitarian crisis facing the country remains hidden because of the focus on the conflict.

It says: “The international community needs to ensure families across the country — not just those living in the conflict zones — are able to access the clean water, nutritious food and healthcare they need to keep their children alive.”

Read More: uruknet.info

He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.

He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has.

He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan.

He has praised Americans for having fought the Vietnamese in their own country and keeps American troops in Iraq, though he called Iraq a “dumb war.” when seeking the votes of citizens no longer supporting that war.

He has praised European settlers for their westward march across America without acknowledging the death and suffering of the indigenous peoples of the continent whose nations the settlers from across the sea conquered

He pre-justified the week long massacre of Gaza, and kept silent during the chilling dispatch of four hundred Palestinian children along with over a thousand of their relatives and friends

While still a candidate, he signed on to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to bankers who favor, propagate and profit from wars.

We could have been pretty sure Obama would never condemn the industrial investment banks of Henry Ford, Rockefeller, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Dupont, Joe Kennedy, Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman, Brown Brothers, J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, ITT, and media magnates William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate, the Chicago Tribune, and others for having backed Adolph Hitler and invested in arming the Germany of the Nazis up to superpower status, knowing full well (and in most cases pleased) that Hitler persecuted Jews and Communists.

Obama has always proclaimed capitalism and the United States as, overall, “a force for good in the world.”

“Hope springs eternal.” is the saying often applied to circumstances that don’t appear to warrant hope.

Zen Buddhists, practicing a strict application of highly disciplined mind, understand “hope’ and “fear’ as two sides of the same coin.

Just as fear can have a negative function, hope can paralyze, can be made to substitute for action and can becloud accurate appraisal and decision making.

Both hope and fear anticipate something that has not yet happened. For example, hoping that a certain damn will not break is similar to fearing that it will.

Fear and hope, not unlike prayers evoked in their name, are retreats from endeavor, a postponement or avoidance of involvement. As does fear, hope lessens the awareness and attention so critical to decisive action.

Millions of progressives, even if not completely hooked by the campaign slogan of “change” hoped that Obama would be different. But, as the wise saying goes, “Hoping doesn’t make it so.”

Before the election our priority was getting a Democrat elected as America’s first black president, and we felt obliged to lay low so the rabid and ignorant right wing plurality out there would not associate Obama with criticism of America, or the peace movement which corporate media characterizes as appeasement and weakness. Immediately after inauguration Obama bombed Pakistan as promised (a promise most assuredly meant for the ear of the military complex).

During our present generation, the lies, misrepresentations and treachery of U.S. presidents (Obama now included), Congresses and a Pentagon subservient media cartel have caused a multi massive amount of Muslim children to fall in harms way of lethal U.S. military action in Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Pakistan and Yemen. This merely continues a century long history of vicious and cruel armed Western imperialism in Muslim lands: various sub-Saharan African colonies, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq, since the Ottoman empire was sliced up for England and France with United States of America in profitable acquiescence.

Our hope was incredibly misplaced, that once in office, Obama would have acted contrary to his promises of bellicose intentions and as an exception to all his imperialist predecessors, that he had only pretended to be a hawk before an war indoctrinated electorate in order to gain office. A capitalist chief executive allowed to place the lives of children being slaughtered by U.S. military in poor Third World countries above the interests of Wall Street war profits would have no precedent.

Extremists fighting for justice in a world of U.S. military hegemony hold the millions of Americans limiting themselves to only hoping for a safer fate for foreign children, guilty and responsible as the Commander-in Chief Obama’s other officials of U.S. corporate governance.

Americans in general have a good amount of leisure but little or no interest in the crimes of their government abroad. Among them are many Americans who are personally disturbed or uncomfortable particularly about their awesomely powerful military taking the lives and limbs of children. But the greater part of pangs of conscience is devoted to hoping rather than any action at all. Those who seek news and information beyond that twisted on TV and in tabloids, will know of daily atrocities by the same boastful military that though having a large military facility less than three hundred miles from the Haiti earthquake zone did little more than block the aid coming into the Port-au Prince airport from other nations, disembarking its fine Navy hospital ship from Maryland only three days after the quake struck.

Since hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, obviously fear of retribution beyond that of 9/11 is more prevalent than the hope that our killing will cease.

This article was originally published by OpEdNews in February 2010.

A former Democratic senator who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the start of the US government’s campaign against Al Qaeda tells Mother Jones he cannot fathom why his Republican replacement squashed his request for an independent review of the interrogation techniques then being used by the CIA. That onetime senator, Bob Graham of Florida, says he believes Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) neglected his obligations as head of the intel panel by smothering Graham’s proposal for a committee assessment of so-called enhanced interrogation practices.

On February 4, 2003, according to a CIA memo released last week, senior CIA officials—including Stanley Moskowitz, the agency’s head of congressional liaison; Scott Muller, the agency’s top lawyer; and James Pavitt, the deputy director for operations—presented a classified briefing in a Capitol Hill office to Roberts and an aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the committee. Over the course of nearly two hours, the briefers covered the CIA’s brutal interrogation (or torture)—including waterboarding—of two detained terrorist suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and told Roberts of the agency’s plan to destroy videotapes of the Zubaydah sessions. The memo noted that Roberts “posed no objection to what he had heard” and “supported the interrogation effort.”

During the meeting, a Roberts aide asked Moskowitz if he had “taken up the line” a request Graham had made in late November 2002 for an independent committee inquiry into the CIA’s interrogation program. (At that time, Graham had been chairing the intelligence committee, but he left the committee in January 2003, as Republicans took over the Senate.)

[Read more at Mother Jones]

Photo by Eugene Richards

I want you to look very closely at this picture and try and keep it in your minds eye. This was a perfectly healthy twenty two-year-old young man who in the service of his country got half of his head blown off. I think that’s important, I think that’s newsworthy. Let me tell you how newsworthy I think it is. I think that it’s more important than chocolate cake recipes and far more important than comic book reviews. It is more important than who fell and whose swell at the winter Olympic games.

It is far more important than any self-serving load of crap banged out by Pseudo doctor Amy. It is more important than American Idol or Lost or any other mindless goat droppings the public chooses to chew on. This is some American mother’s son, her little boy, he may be gay or straight or transgender but his life is fucked forever.

How did this come to happen to this poor mother’s son? It came to happen because the people in the media who are supposed to foster a public debate on such public issues as war instead used their franchise to promote articles about chocolate cake and comic book reviews. They see their free press as free to choose not to look when bad thinks happen. They feel no need to explain to his parents or to anyone that the war that blew off half of this poor boys head was based on out and out lies.

It was a war perpetrated by people who hoped to gain from it be it in oil or pipelines or service contracts and like the media they don’t care that this mother’s son is mangled and mutilated. Do you care? I’ve been married twice for a combined twenty-five years and in that time I doubt my wives ever baked a chocolate cake. I don’t read comic books or watch goat crap TV but you see I’ve got a son about this boy’s age. My heart aches and my mind fills with rage because the people that have the power and authority to show this picture would rather talk about American Idol and from where I sit that makes them an accomplice to a war crime…

[continues at Salon]

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney blocked any reference to gay rights in a new study guide for immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship, the Canadian Press has learned.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says his department tried to make an ‘inclusive’ immigration study guide, but couldn’t fit in every government policy and legal decision.Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says his department tried to make an ‘inclusive’ immigration study guide, but couldn’t fit in every government policy and legal decision. (CBC)

Internal documents show an early draft of the guide contained sections noting that homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969; that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation; and that same-sex marriage was legalized nationally in 2005.

But Kenney, who fought same-sex marriage when it was debated in Parliament, ordered those key sections removed when his office sent its comments to the department last June.

Senior department officials duly cut out the material — but made a last-ditch plea with Kenney in early August to have it reinstated.

“Recommend the re-insertion of the text boxes related to … the decriminalization of homosexual sex/recognition of same-sex marriage,” says a memorandum to Kenney from deputy minister Neil Yeates.

“Recommend the addition of ‘equality rights’ under list of rights. Had noted earlier that this bullet should be reinserted into the list as a means of noting the equality of all based on race, gender, sexual orientation etc.”

In the end, however, Kenney’s view trumped that of the bureaucrats. The 63-page guide, titled Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, was released with fanfare last November and contains no mention of gay and lesbian rights.

About 500,000 copies were printed and citizenship applicants will start being tested on its contents March 15.

[Read more at CBC News]

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) issued a media release on the 18th February 2010 under the heading: “Over a million cases of household property damage”, found that: “there are  approximately 1.6 million incidents of malicious property damage” across Australia, and that: “912,500 households (11%) were victims of at least one incident of property damage in the 12 months” between 2008 and 2009.

In a more detailed report on the crime victimisation figure, ABS also released the following information:

In December 2008, 16.9 million people aged 15 years or over were living in private dwellings in Australia. It was estimated that in the 12 months prior to interview, of those aged 15 years or over:

• 527,400 (3.1%) people were victims of at least one physical assault
• 718,600 (4.2%) people were victims of at least one threatened assault, including face-to-face and non face-to-face threatened assaults
• 96,700 (0.6%) people were victims of at least one robbery.

As for the issue of household crime, ABS has the following breakdown figures:

In December 2008, Australia had 8.2 million households. It was estimated that in the 12 months prior to interview:

• 267,800 (3.3%) households were victims of at least one break-in to their home, garage or shed
• 251,300 (3.1%) households were victims of at least one attempted break-in to their home, garage or shed
• 91,000 (1.1%) households had at least one motor vehicle stolen
• 369,200 (4.5%) households were victims of at least one theft from a motor vehicle
• 912,500 (11%) households were victims of at least one incident of malicious property damage
• 362,400 (4.4%) households were victims of at least one other theft.

Total silent on the crime figures by the Australian media

When I received the above crime figures on my mail box (I am a subscriber to ABS), I was expecting to hear the news on ABC radio, SBS evening news and read them in my mail box over the next few days from the major newspapers across the country. To my surprise, the mainstream media across Australia were totally muted on the latest crime data. Why?

I cannot help feeling that the media industry in Australia is not as free as we were made to believe.

Total silent from the Politicians across the county: Federal, States and Locals

The irony is that, the politicians from all side of the politics with the exception of Senator Steve Fielding of a minor party  were totally silent as well on the latest ABS’s crime figures. Why?

In a self promotion style of reporting on the Australia.To’s website, Senator Fielding mentioned the ABS crime figure and blamed that on “alcohol fuelled violence” and call upon governments “to stamp out binge drinking and the associated problems that go with it.”

That is about all I could find through internet search any politician in Australia bother to at least mention the crime figure from ABS since 18 February 2010.

Australians are totally ignorance about the latest ABS crime figures

In order to make sure that my perception of a total media silent in Australia on the issue is accurate, I have casually spoken to more than a hundred people over the last 10 days (including friends in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane; office workers, business owners and shoppers in the shopping center where I work; and market stall holders where I shopped on the weekend. The reality is, non of the people I spoke to knew anything about the ABS crime figures.

With a sense of responsibility towards the statements I made in this article, I double check the internet this morning through Yahoo and Google, only the Australian Women Online reported this news. The few internet bloggers website provided the news links back to the Australian Women Online.

The Pro– criminal’s Culture within our Media Industry and politicians

Past records and incidents indicated that our media and politicians seems not too concern about the victims of crimes whether domestically or overseas. We seems to have a culture to:

(1) Demonise another culture or countries whenever our criminals or citizens were arrested in a non-Western country:

For example, on the 20th July 2009, under the title: “Aussies face bribe charges in Dubai”, Sydney Morning Herald  has the following quote from the defendant lawyer:

Mr Amad said the figure was unlikely to recede, given foreigners were increasingly being made scapegoats for soured business deals. “More and more people are now starting to understand the risks in doing business overseas,” he said. “With the impact of the global financial crisis, I think more and more people will be charged on similar allegations and I think Australians and the Australian Government need to be aware that this is a distinct possibility.”

Note:

(a) In the absence of information in regards to the detail and evidence of the charges lay against the two Aussies, it was kind of bias and irresponsible for the Sydney Morning Herald to quote exclusively the personal opinion of the defendant lawyer (person who received money from the defendant) and give readers the impression that “the Aussies are victims and being made scapegoats for soured business deals”.

(b) We did not hear about the subsequent outcome of this case. But readers begin to form negative impression about the “Risks in doing business overseas”. That is, the mentality of “Overseas are not as civilise as Australia” if I may put it this way.

Please read also my analysis on the Australian media and politicians behaviour in the Rio Tinto Bribery Case and the Australian legal frame work against Foreign Bribery. In this article, you will notice that, the same techniques have been adopted in reporting the arrest of Rio Tinto Executives in Shanghai. The so-called quotes from “Experts” were people without a name, and those with a name, were no expert at all.

(2) Demonise another culture or countries by expressing sympathy to our own convicted criminal overseas

For example, our convicted drug trafficker – the Corby Case in Indonesia – Our media never bother to report the tragic stories of  the victims of drug in Indonesia, however, they seems to be very keen in persuading the message that, Indonesian prison is not humane and Corby is a victim, we should bring her home.

Please read the following news links to analyse the content by yourself:

• Schapelle dying: boyfriend – Brisbane Time, 10 Nov 2009
• Hope gone, Corby escapes her Bali cell to a world of fantasy – WAToday, 23 Jan 2010 (source: The Age)

As usual, our populist politicians also added their voice to the case. For example, Corby’s release hinges on historic agreement: PM (Brisbane Times, 31 Aug 2009)

Our Prime Minister even go to the extent in December 2009, issued guidelines to the Australian Federal Police “stipulating that police consider a suspect’s age, nationality and whether capital punishment is likely when co-operating with foreign countries.”(The Age, 11 Jan 2010 – Bid to save Bali nine member).

Apparently, our politicians and media industry care more for our criminals overseas then our victims of crime at home. What can we do?

(3) Demonise another culture or countries on behalf of other Western’s criminals

The recent case of a British drug trafficker sentence to death in China attracted a wide spread reports and condemnation of China by the mainstream Western media and some Western politicians throughout the world including Australia.

As usual, the media in Australia is against reporting the issue using a selective, partial  and bias approach with the intention to demonise China. Many statements made by China relating to the case wasn’t reported by the media. (If you can read Chinese, please read the following analysis by the Hong Kong media (1) Double Standard of the West (2) British hypocrisy on the issue of  Judicial Independent).  Anyway, I do not wish to waste too much time on this issue as it is not the key message I would like to share with readers in this article.

I believe that, for the sake of humanity, our media and politicians should focus on the bigger issues of drugs such as its adverse effect on individuals, families and the society as a whole.  For the benefit of those who may be interested in the issue, please click on the following links:

• Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Statistics & Resources
• Addiction and Health (Note: Drug addiction responsible for an estimated 5 million deaths worldwide each year)

(4) Blame the Victims of crimes instead of the criminals

Few weeks ago, at the height of the diplomatic tension (The Age, 21 Jan 2010) between India and Australia over the numerous cases of attacks against Indians in Australia, instead of condemning the attackers, our police chief in Victoria blamed the victims and called upon the Indians to “Keep low profile, look poor to avoid attacks” (Times of India, 7 Feb 2010).

At the same time on the 21st January 2010, the Brisbane Times reported a complaint by the Alabama Attorney-General in America “frustrated by Queensland’s lack of help in Watson case”.

What is wrong with our social psyche on the issue of crimes and their victims?

Human rights should includes the right of one citizens and their properties safety in their own backyards

Personally, I am a victim of crimes myself. For examples,

Few months ago one night, both my family cars were smashed  in our own carport. According to the police, there were about 50 teenagers armed with baseball bats smashed into a vacant home about 1 km away from where I live to have a party. One of the neighbour lodged a police complaint and they were forced to leave the property. Some of these teenagers begin to terrorise against passing by vehicles along the street.

For some reason, they decided to chase after one of the car for a kilometre and end up on my drive way.  There was a big fight along my drive way and before leaving, they smashed not only the car of the victim they chase, but both our family cars as well. It was a scary experience as it happened only a meter away from my living room.

In another earlier incident 3 years ago, my cash register has been emptied within a minute by a group of teenagers walking into my shop. There were numerous incidents of stealing by individuals and groups over the last 4 years since I started the retail business. These teenagers demonstrated no respect at all to anybody they came by.

Again, around 3 years ago, a customer brought in a pair of signed gloves and photo to have them framed . On the due date, he came in to have a look at the workmanship, paid $50 and told me he will pay the balance and pick it up on his pay day. However, he never returned.

Approximately 2 years later,  he suddenly stood in front of me with a crutch. He told me that he was robbed and attacked by some teenagers using their skate boards outside a shopping center. He has been hospitalised for almost a year, and only recently he managed to walk by himself. He was very pleased that I still have his signed memorabilia for him.

There are too many of this kind of stories I knew of and are able to share with you. But this is not the issue. The issue is when do our polices, our media, our politicians and our judges going to do something to protect the human right of the average decent Australians to ensure their personal safety and property safety in their own country?

We love to use small stories to demonise other culture and countries to make us fell good. Why can’t we do something to make us a model society for the world to admire and follow. Why can’t we report the latest crime figures and push our politicians, our judges and our polices to get off their butts and do something positive to protect the safety of the Australian public.

What happen to our democracy? Can’t our system produce competent leaders serving our interest?

Our politicians and bureaucrats are ‘out of touch’ with the society, the solutions against crime is within the people on the street

If your life is as simple as I was before I set up a retail business in a regional CBD. The chances are you may be a born Australian, but you knew nothing about Australia. The reason is simple, I was in a wholesales business for about 10 years before going into retail. During that 10 years, I operate the business from home. I travelled to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane once or twice a year to participate in Trade Fairs at the Convention Center to built my contacts with retailers across the country.

The rest of the time, I stay at home waiting for orders to come in by faxes, e-mails or phones. I learned to design my own website and promote my products via e-mail and direct mailing to customers and potential customers I contacted at the Trade Fair. Technically, my world is very small – beside sending our son to school, doing our weekly shopping and sometime going for a movie at a cinema or visiting a video shop, eating out, gathering with friends, I have only very limited contact with the wider Australian society.

I believe that this is the kind of life style most of our bureaucrats and politicians live in. Travel between the Parliament House and their home, travel around the country pre-arranged with the accompanied of a group of people. Walking the street, shaking hand with the public at a shopping center before an election for show. Our politicians are mostly surrounded by lobby groups representing the special interest of some rich businesses or foreign countries. The so-called direct contact with the society are basically an artificial one without the opportunity for a personal touch  – not to mention the opportunity to understand  the other person feeling and in dept thinking on a variety of issues within the community.

Like most people in Australia, I was once belong to this category of people. However, when I moved into a retail environment in a regional CBD, working 6 days a week and had the opportunity to directly contact and speak with people from all walk of life including homeless, ex-prisoners, people with mental illness, lonely pensioners, professionals and overseas visitors……..and also people who came in group time and again to steal from me. Without these experience, and the curiosity and initiative to talk to these people and try to understand them, I can comfortably assure you that, you may be a born Australian, you knew nothing about Australia.

As mentioned above, the only politician who bother to mention the latest ABS crime figure is  Senator Steve Fielding, but his understanding and solutions to the crime problem is a typical example of an ‘out of touch’ politicians in our society (Sorry to say that).  He blamed the 1.6 million incidents of malicious property damage squarely on “alcohol fuelled violence” and call upon governments “to stamp out binge drinking and the associated problems that go with it.”

In fact, few years ago, some of our States and Locals government already had in place laws that ban alcohol in certain public area such as beaches. As a result, my good friend Steve, a hard working Australian, not aware of the new law was fined $170  one evening after work – when he walked to the beach 50m from his factory after 5pm with a can of beer on his hand trying to relax.

Few months later, he went to Vietnam for a holiday, he sit in front of a beautiful beach and was served with a lobster and beer for only USD10. When he returned, he told me his experience in Vietnam and the story of Australians who fall in love with the Vietnamese life style and showing no intention to return home. He asked me “What’s wrong with our society?” “I didn’t even have the freedom to have a beer 50m away from my factory after work”.

Common sense tell us, 1.6 million cases of malicious damage to property within 12 months is a big number.  The reason is far more complex then “binge drinking”. We have to examine the whole issue in a holistic manner. These includes a review to our education system, family values, welfare structure, homelessness, unemployment, poverty, media responsibility, law enforcement, police numbers and the ability of our bureaucrats and politicians to understanding the sources of the problems.

Let me end this article with one more story. Like most retailers, I used to be nervous when a group of teenagers walked into my shop, going in different direction, messing thing around and walk out at the same time. You knew they steal from you, but you cannot do much as you are alone in the shop. And they keep coming in time and again.

I was bothered by one of these group of teenagers for a number of months until one day, I spoke to a young man whom himself a homeless sometime ago, he asked me to make friend with these people, talk to them. He told me “they need love from the society”.

Guess what, once I begin to say “Hello” to them, use their language telling them you looks “cool” today and talk to them – and my problem is over. They continue to bother other shops and one day, one of the security in the shopping center came around to tell us that one of the boy from this group has been caught stealing, and he is banned from the shopping center. So, we were asked to phone the security when we spotted him in the center.

In fact, some of these problems are racially motivated: Click for Latest incident.

Conclusions

The solutions to our massive crime problem is not limited to “binge drinking”. These teenagers or young men and women need to have a sense of purpose in the society. They need to have something to do. The solutions have to be holistic and comprehensive directing at the causes of the problem. Our media, polices and politicians attitude towards these criminal acts play a critical role in solving the problem.

An advice to our media industry: If you care for Australia, please report the latest ABS crime figures, make a series of special report on these crimes, interview people on the street including those who committed the crimes. Use your power to push our politicians to act on the issues.  Australians like myself are annoyed by your censorship of our own problems and relenting effort to demonise others. The victims of crimes want you to care for them and their human right to live safely in their own backyards.

Written on 3 March 2010

By Outcast Journalist in Australia (www.outcastjournalist.com)

For most Americans, science is akin to magic. We don’t know how much of this shit occurs, but as long as everything keeps humming along smoothly we feel some sense of peace. The problem with this state of being is that it allows for all sorts of rival interpretations on things that are basically cut and dry.

I’ve had many arguments with religious types regarding abortion, and most cannot wrap their heads around the fact that the gestating fetus is indeed a part of the woman whose belly it’s in, which seems fairly straightforward. I don’t mean to go all Amazon woman on you, but I have to believe the fervently religious who protest in front of abortion clinics and wish death on doctors who perform the procedure have to be somewhat perturbed that a woman, a lesser being according to their holy bible, is in charge of this impending life.

A bill is being proposed in Utah that would criminalize pregnant women who do intentional harm to the fetus. The bill came about after a teenager, probably in response to the difficulty of obtaining a legal abortion in Utah, had someone throttle her stomach in order to stop the pregnancy. Instead of getting this girl some counseling and moving her the hell out of Utah, they attempted to charge her with murder, which fortunately didn’t fly. The next desperate teen may not be so lucky. The exact language of the bill is as follows:

A person commits criminal homicide if [he] the person intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, with criminal negligence, or acting with a mental state otherwise specified in the statute defining the offense, causes the death of another human being, including an unborn child at any stage of its development (see here)

Read More: Black Sun Gazette

Here is another (controversial) chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.

These numbers obviously weren’t chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.

Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the “Final Solution” and the jackbooted takeover of Europe. Worse, he showed that the top levels of the company either knew or willfully turned a blind eye.

A year and a half after that book gave Big Blue a black eye, the author made more startling discoveries. IBM equipment was on-site at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Furthermore:

Thanks to the new discoveries, researchers can now trace how Hollerith numbers assigned to inmates evolved into the horrific tattooed numbers so symbolic of the Nazi era. (Herman Hollerith was the German American who first automated US census information in the late 19th century and founded the company that became IBM. Hollerith’s name became synonymous with the machines and the Nazi “departments” that operated them.) In one case, records show, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz in August 1943 and was assigned a characteristic five digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673. The number was part of a custom punch-card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in all Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant’s same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non- Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.

The Hollerith numbering system was soon scrapped at Auschwitz because so many inmates
died. Eventually, the Nazis developed their own haphazard system.

Reference: Black, Edwin. “The IBM Link to Auschwitz.” Village Voice, 9 Oct 2002.

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

While quite a bit of a fuss was raised regarding the kidnapping, smuggling and trafficking in Haitian children and rightly so, the same can’t be said about the fate of Iraqi children.

I have already written several posts about this new lucrative business in Iraq, that of the kidnapping, trafficking and trading of children, and I am always aghast to see that no media or organization for the protection of children, like the famous UNICEF or Save the Child or OXFAM or anyone else, has given enough attention and dedicated effort to denounce and stop this tragedy…

Of course, before our “liberation” such criminality involving the selling, buying, trading, kidnapping, killing of children was unheard of…am I to deduce that Freedom and Democracy are baby killers? Am afraid so.

Hussein Anwar kindly forwarded this article a couple of months ago and I have been so busy with other things and only found the time today to translate it for you.

Read More: uruknet.info

It’s fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. Evgeny Morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.

A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It’s not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn’t—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google’s popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.

Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic’s complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran’s state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country’s communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day). The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization now forms one of the pillars of “techno-utopianism.”

[Read more at WSJ]

From The News Tribune:

As debate club president and a top student, Arlington High School senior Justin Surber has studied the constitutional rights of free speech.

Surber, 18, recently took a stand that will keep him from appearing in his club’s yearbook photo.

Once a week, Surber wears a black T-shirt featuring the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s take on religion. In block letters, the shirt reads “GOD IS DEAD.”

Nobody has told him he can’t wear the shirt to school. He wears it to provoke debate, he says, and that’s why he wore the shirt the day the debate club photo was taken for the yearbook.

Now Surber believes his T-shirt prompted the school’s yearbook adviser to ask for a retake of the photo, without the T-shirt.

“I feel I am a victim of censorship,” Surber said.

When a student yearbook staff member came to take a second photo of the debate club a few weeks ago, Surber’s friend Reed Summerlin asked for an explanation.

The yearbook staffer indicated she had been asked by the yearbook adviser not to tell Surber the reason for the retake, Summerlin said. “She said it was about Justin’s shirt.”

In protest, Surber and Summerlin chose not to be in the second photo.

[Read more at The News Tribune]

The FBI is investigating a Pennsylvania school district officials accused of secretly activating webcams inside students’ homes, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press.

The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Days after a student filed a suit over the practice, Lower Merion officials acknowledged on Friday that they remotely activated webcams 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing student laptops. They insist they never did so to spy on students, as the student’s family claimed in the federal lawsuit.

Families were not informed of the possibility the webcams might be activated in their homes without their permission in the paperwork students sign when they get the computers, district spokesman Doug Young said.

“It’s clear what was in place was insufficient, and that’s unacceptable,” Young said.

The district has suspended the practice amid the lawsuit and the accompanying uproar from students, the community and privacy advocates.

[Read more at MSN]

Gay and lesbian state workers in Virginia are no longer specifically protected against discrimination, thanks to a little-noticed change made by new Gov. Bob McDonnell.

McDonnell (R) on Feb. 5 signed an executive order that prohibits discrimination “on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, political affiliation, or against otherwise qualified persons with disabilities,” as well as veterans.

It rescinds the order that Gov. Tim Kaine signed Jan. 14, 2006 as one of his first actions. After promising a “fair and inclusive” administration in his inaugural address, Kaine (D) added veterans to the non-discrimination policy — and sexual orientation.

Read More: Talking Points Memo

The arrest of a student for “swearing” at President Jacob Zuma’s convoy is a tactic of a police state, not a democracy, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Wednesday.

DA leader Helen Zille said the way the police acted was a reminder of the actions of the apartheid-era security police.

“They are reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, which the African National Congress is increasingly trying to emulate,” said Zille.

Chumani Maxwele was arrested on Wednesday last week when he allegedly showed his middle finger to Zuma’s convoy while he was jogging in De Waal Street in Cape Town. He was arrested at gunpoint by police officers.

He allegedly had a bag pulled over his head and was first taken to Zuma’s residence, before he was taken to Rondebosch and then the Mowbray police station, where he was allegedly interrogated by intelligence officers.

He was kept for just less than 24 hours and was released before appearing in court on charges of crimen injuria and resisting arrest.

Zweli Mnisi, spokesperson for the Police Ministry, said Maxwele became aggressive when he was questioned by police.

“Aggression towards the police is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” said Mnisi.

[Read more from the Mail & Guardian]

The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews. The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.

Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit. A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.

Read More: Telegraph