Archive for January, 2004

‘We know that Mr. Bush has committed himself to the mafia … to assassinate me,” the Cuban president said, using the term commonly employed here to describe anti-Castro Cuban Americans.
Castro’s comments came at the end of a 5 ½ hour speech that began Thursday night and continued into early Friday at the closing of a conference bringing together activists across the region who oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
”I can die a natural death or I can die a planned death,” Castro said. “It really doesn’t matter to me how I die, but I will surely die fighting.”

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Chinese dissidents say that despite the government’s best efforts to stop them, they are successfully using the internet to spread their messages ever more widely through the world’s most populous country.
But despite the help of several major international corporations and the use of the most sophisticated equipment, the Chinese government is finding the worldwide web much harder to censor than traditional media.

Any idea which corporations are involved?
Btw, I wrote an essay on Chinese censorship for a POLS class when I was an undergrad. Here is the conclusion:

Whether immediate efforts to prevent coordination among dissidents are successful, China’s attempts at censorship are bound to fail in the long run. Because the Internet’s value as a commercial and research tool are bound to grow, and are closely intertwined with alternative uses, the costs of preventing access to any particular material is bound to become prohibitively expensive, especially with the rapid and exponential growth of Internet users in China. Meanwhile, the best strategy democratic nations can follow is to make China’s censorship policy as costly as possible by sponsoring the development of circumvention technologies.

(Edit: “democratic nations” refers to private initiative by citizens of free countries – not another government program.)

I’ve often wondered how socialists can possibly explain away the actual track record of socialist regimes in countries like the USSR, Cuba, and China. Now I know: they were actually capitalist countries all along!
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Get this: according to the leftists, even one civilian death was unacceptable when our troops went after Saddam. However, when it comes to the “anti-occupation resistance,” innocent deaths are perfectly fine, says a prominent leftist pundit:

Do you think the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq’s anti-occupation resistance?
“Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the “Bush gang” will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.”

(I am just going to ignore the fact that he’s rooting for the collapse of any chance for democracy and American soldier’s and Iraqi civilians deaths — to leftists, destroying Bush’s popularity is paramount.)
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Apparently, it was all about the grease:

Claims that dozens of politicians, including some from prominent anti-war countries such as France, had taken bribes to support Saddam Hussein are to be investigated by the Iraqi authorities. The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council decided to check after an independent Baghdad newspaper, al-Mada, published a list which it said was based on oil ministry documents.

Plans to build a major new medical laboratory in England were scrapped Tuesday in the face of protests by animal rights groups, who claimed the decision as a major victory….Cambridge University said the project, which would have used monkeys for neurological testing, would no longer go ahead and cited spiraling costs over security needed to keep out anti-vivisectionist groups.
…The university and the publicly funded Medical Research Council (MRC), said the decision was a great disappointment as the laboratory would have attracted scientists from around the world to work on diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s….”The research is vital and ‘vital’ means likely to save lives,” he said. “This research will go on elsewhere…in the world.”

Once again, the sick eco-freaks behind the “animal rights” movement show what they really hate: technology – and the human lives it saves.

Check out John Stosell’s “List of Popularly Reported Misconceptions.” Every one of them should be obvious to any educated individual with an ounce of independent thought. That they are rarely recognized as such in the media and elsewhere is a sad testament to irrationalism of our society.