“One in eight babies in the UK is born prematurely and prematurity is the leading cause of disability and of infant death in the first month after birth.” -BBC

Still think humunz are the result of an intelligent designer? Anyone holding this view demonstrates as much intelligence as their imagined designer.

Irony, it is said, often escapes most Americans and whilst this may be an unforgiveable generalisation, I recently heard one American General say that Iran had to be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Come again? Did he imply one should deter people from pursuing what America otherwises like to call a ‘nuclear deterrant’? Part of the Mutually Assured Destruction philosophy that Britain, likewise, claims actually prevents nuclear war?

Someone call the Double Standards agency, please.

The International Atomic Energy Agency are sending people to inspect the pile of rubble, courtesy Zion Airlines Inc. - motto “we fly, you die” - that was formerly the construction site of weapons of mass destruction (we are led to believe) in Syria. The rubble, sorry nuclear reactor, was being constructed with the aid of Mysteron technology, oops, North Korean technology and according to this BBC report was viewed by the American government as “not for peaceful purposes”.

The IAEA’s director general Mohamed ElBaradei is quoted as saying:

“It is deeply regrettable that information concerning this installation was not provided to the agency in a timely manner and that force was resorted to unilaterally before the agency was given an opportunity to establish the facts.”

Erm, is it just me, or does the phrase IRAQ WAR come screaming to mind? I recall hearing former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter speaking in Edinburgh a couple of years ago. Understandably he was miffed (to say the least) that the United States government leveled Iraq before he and his team could finish their inspections back in 2003.

But back to the story - was this a nuclear reactor? In a country which has just become a net importer of oil, and which had relied on oil as a major source of revenue, and where oil coupons are being issued so that ordinary people can continue to buy fuel for cooking, why on earth would they be mad enough to look for an alternative source of energy? One shouldn’t stop to consider that when globally 100 new nuclear power stations are planned and 29 are actively in construction, in countries that haven’t yet run out of the black stuff, why should a nation that has effectively run out seek an alternative? Better by far to destroy the Mysteron-inspired evil-doing. Unfortunately for Zion Airlines Inc, no women or toddlers could be found running screaming inside, but better luck next time, there’s always Gaza boys.

Assuming it was a nuclear reactor and the purpose was to assemble a nuclear explosive device - one has to ask what is wrong with this? Yep, you heard me correctly. The Cold War was based on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction, still the reason given for retention of English nuclear weapons (most Scots want them removed from Scottish soil, we’re a 10-1 minority, hence they’re not British but English. I digress). There’s no mutual unless both sides have the same lethal capacity, this is child’s play reasoning. Rational people might dispute the MADness, but as it is formally stated by the United States and other nations as a fundamental requirement for keeping the peace (read: no global nuclear holocaust) then it should extend to all nations , by their logic.

From Syria’s perspective, you have only to look at this:

1. Iraq was obliterated by the United States (and Britain). Would this have happened if Iraq possessed even a single atomic bomb? Realistically, faced with total destruction of your country, personal arrest and trial, execution assured, Mr Hussein would have retaliated with a nuclear device, most certainly. No-one would stone-age such a country.

2. Is there a large unfriendly population on your doorstep that murders non-Jewish civilians on a daily basis, has been compared to the Nazis by Jewish American UN representatives, still occupies your land, steals your (water) resources, violating a huge number of global conventions on how war and subsequent occupation should be carried out? Er, yes, tick that box.

   “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not”.
   Richard Falk

3. Does that population have nuclear weapons? About 100 to 150, it is reliably thought. Oh, and that cuddly humanitarian ‘Killer‘ Kissinger reckons that Israel is the most likely country/entity on Earth to use them first (you can look that up). That’s nice.

4. Does the country who just took your neighbour, Iraq, back to the Stone Age based on the biggest pack of lies and PR the world has possibly ever seen, supply $4 billion of weaponry a year to your Israeli neighbour? Oh, yes they do that too, wow.

5. Are there 50+ million American Christian funda-mental-ists who believe their Lord and Saviour will only return once Israel has destroyed it’s enemies (read: Syria, Iran, you know, those kind of unbelieving scumbags)? Why, yes, you’re right again!

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that recent events lead to one inescapable conclusion:
Arm yourself with atomic weapons or face annihilation from the United States and/or their proxy, Israel.

This should be self-evident, but let’s look at the current situation. The war machine of the United States/Israeli partnership has Iranian evildoers in their gunsights for daring, in a peak-oil world, to develop non-military nuclear power (as confirmed in the International Atomic Engery Agency report of June 5th 2008: Iranian Uranium enrichment is at a level suitable only for cilvilian nuclear reactor usage; it is categorically not weapons-grade). Israel has nonetheless recently completed military exercises to simulate an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. So the proxy army of Jewish ‘mentalists are rattling sabers once again. And how might their intended target respond to such an attack? Quoting from the BBC:

“The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Mohammed ElBaradei, meanwhile said an attack would put Iran on a “crash course” to building nuclear weapons and would turn the region “into a fireball”.

Black and white: if you don’t have nuclear weapons, the fanatical alliance of nuclear-armed ‘mentlist Christians and (even more?) ‘mentalist Zionist partners-in-crime will murder you with their high-tech toys.

Life-long CND supporter that I am, having marched against nuclear weapons in towns and villages most of you have never heard of, what would I say to the Syrian or Iranian leadership on this, if asked? In light of the facts, which sane country would not be building a nuclear bomb right now?

I think I may be absurd. You see, after watching Joss Whedon’s wonderful sci-fi series FireFly, I checked up on him and found he claims to be an absurdist. So the power of Google led me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism which has to be one of the most fascinating pages on the web. At least, for people like me.

According to this page, I’m either an absurdist, an Athieistic existentialist or Nihilist … and if I’d studied English further, might know whether to capitlise the first letters of these words or not (I weary of that kind of trivia, written words merely represents a sound, sounds have at their root no meaning other than what we attach, so what difference can capitalisation really make? I know, I know, you see through me, I simply don’t know enough grammar, you got me.)

Further narrowing down leads me to suspect atheistic existentialism more befits my line of thought, but who other than me could possibly care? Well it’s not about me, not completely - it’s about a well thought out, philosophical basis on which to underpin everything. Everything being one’s world view, one’s understanding, literally all that a person is, imagines themselves to be, and the framework for the sum of experiences which they term their life.

Reading the words of Camus and Kierkegaard, one has to ask why are the words of these thinkers not taught in Schools? Why are children’s heads filled with non-sensical dogma labeled religion and given some untouchable status? I was lucky enough to have friends (hey Wrecker!) who espoused the views of these thinkers at University but failed to see the significance at the time, thinking they were stating the obvious. They were! But how this beautiful obvious is demonised, feared, hidden away, loathed by the dogmites - the dead minds who fill your world and mine with fear, dread and ignorance.

Carl Sagan’s words accompanied by music and video cry out to be included in this post, an extract from the amazing Pale Blue Dot production - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luAteAz3WQ0

Surrounded as I write by Catholic churches, Catholic-only schools, Church of Scotland shrines here there and everywhere, a 5-minute walk from the aptly named “Holy Corner”, yes, I’d say absurd befits my status nicely.

The phrase “the elephant in the room” is commonly applied when illustrating religious dogma, and what more dogmatic entity than that which colonises Palestine, and terms itself ‘Israel’. But the elephant, in this case, is not Zionist delusion - tempting though that is to write about - but Gaza. What is being done to the people of Gaza is one hell of a big elephant that the world’s politicians seem not to have noticed.

Gaza is Palestine’s lethal open prison. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would urge anyone reading this post to just take a look at this short BBC News article entitled “Life in the ‘open prison’ of Gaza“. The article is sickening.

The collective punishment of Gaza citizens by the Israeli government is not only morally repugnant, but illegal under the most important laws of the 20th Century - those that sought to limit the savagery of human warfare so that non-combatants were afforded (at least in principle) some degree of protection. I have argued this in earlier writing, but the case is made most clearly and eloquently in a petition served to the Supreme Court of Israel by bodies including “The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel” (homepage).

The petition demands a halt to plans by the Israeli Defense Minister and Prime Minister to cut power and fuel supplies to the inhabitants of Gaza, and the specific ‘war crimes’ aspect of this may be found on page 11, from which I quote below:

The actions of the Respondents are subject to humanitarian law by force of the Regulations
concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Hague Convention of 1907,
which apply directly in Israeli law, being part of customary law (heretofore: “the Hague Regulations”),
as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War (heretofore: the Fourth Geneva Convention) (HCJ 393/82 Jamaiyat Iskan vs. the commander of
IDF Forces, v. 37(4) 785, 792 (heretofore: the “Jamaiyat Iskan affair”); HCJ 4764/04 Physicians for
Human Rights vs. the commander of IF forces in Gaza, v. 58(5) 385, 393 (heretofore: the Physicians
for Human Rights Affair) and see also Orna Ben Naftali and Yuval Shani, International Law –
Between Peace and War (Ramot 2006), p.243 (heretofore: Ben Naftali and Shani).

The basic instruction of humanitarian international law, starting with the commencement of warfare,
is that the local residents “…are under all circumstances entitled to respect for their persons, their
honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs.
They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of
violence or threats thereof…” (Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. See also article 46 of the
Hague Regulations).

But then what would one expect from a State that inflicts torture (BBC) and false imprisonment on those whose land it so brutally confiscated? When senior investigators in the United Nations compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazi’s, well, perhaps they’re just anti-semitic, or terrorist-lovers, or some such nasty thing. (And yes I know about the ‘anti-Semite’ nonsense spouted by Zionist delusionals, seems they’re the only crowd who don’t know the proper meaning of the word … delusional and ignorant, now there’s a winning combination for a peace plan, eh?).

Like so many of my generation - late 60’s - I didn’t know who Tim Buckley was until a long time after his death. The same for the haunting, humourful, poetic Phil Ochs.

This YouTube posting sets one of Tim Buckley’s most beautiful, and fitting, songs to images from the slaughter that is the Iraq ‘war’. Can there be anyone on the planet who hasn’t seen this or that documentary citing the criminal American and British government acts responsible for this breakdown of an entire country?

So many pointless deaths - of which I include the American soldiers, despite the records of civilian torture and murder, mistaken shootings, and terror raids on families as they sleep. Sorry, I meant to say terrorists as they sleep. Poor, gullible people, whose heads are filled with dreary, familiar rhetoric from their insane masters in Washington.

But good people, American soldiers, died in hundreds of thousands to free Europe from the Nazis. Among the American soldiers of today likewise there must surely be countless honourable, good people. I genuinely mourne their dead too, who died - most likely in miserable circumstances - for the deceit of their treacherous leaders - Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave? Ah, that’ll be Disneyland then. It surely, surely isn’t the United States. (American readers, if you want it to be your land, go read any Chomsky book before you get all mad, nationalistic and gun-happy, ok? Your eyes might open rather widely.)

You can call it sentimental, I really don’t care, I’m an extremist. I have the extreme view that not a single innocent child should have their tiny, maimed, lifeless body carried out of a bombed-out building to further someone’s delusional power games, to reign destruction on an innocent people to quell a non-existant threat, and in the process cheapen all our lives.

So maybe Prozac doesn’t work better than a placebo, but my hat is taken off in admiration of the consultant psychiatrist on the news tonight who said

“Nobody in their right mind would suggest people stop taking their medication …“

I mean, come on man, “Nobody in their right mind?”
Sensitivity, that’s what I like in the UK Medical Profession.

Nothing I write here is of the slightest worth compared to Alive in Baghdad’s video entitled
“In Iraq, Carbombs & Terrorism Don’t Discriminate”.

Be seriously warned, this is not a pleasant video. I wish, perhaps, that I had never seen it myself.

Bremer? The genius who disbanded the Iraqi army, undoubtedly the most direct cause of the current insanity in that country. But did you also know …

There are not words in this world to cover for reading such things.

Unusually for me, I am speechless, rendered dumb - careful please - in admiration for this lady, Wafa Sultan (Wiki). Reading the Wiki entry, anyone can see what purportedly caused her to reject Islam, it’s quite shocking to read.

If you have any interest in Islam whatsoever, I would urge you to click on her picture here to visit the Youtube video page which records her broadcast on Al-Jazeera in which Islam is forthrightly shown up for what it really is - by an amazing, intelligent, ex-muslim lady.

“Fifteen years ago Pope John Paul II officially conceded that in fact the Earth was not stationary“. (BBC, Jan 2008).

A word to the wise, to all the good, self-declared Catholics out there listening to the infallible voice of the chosen-deity on Earth … erm, don’t you think your boy’s just a tad slow on the uptake here?

Even Ratzinger - the current (cough, ex Hitler-youth) infallible incarnation holds the trial of Galileo as “rational and just”. Ah, that’ll be Catholic justice then, I was worried for a minute there… bring back the hot irons, boys.