Radical Islamic madness

Katsina, Nigeria–Last year, a 30 year old woman, Amina Lawal, was found guilty of adultery under newly introduced Islamic holy laws. As punishment for the affair and the child it produced, Amina Lawal was given the death penalty. When her time to die comes, she will be buried up to her neck in sand. When only her head remains exposed, those watching will be invited to throw stones until the 30-year-old single mother is dead.

MichaelMoore.com has full details on how to protest this abomination.  Go to Friday Sep 20.

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Wants war, can’t read

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GOP senator tries gay-friendly campaign

The Senator from Oregon become the first ever Senator to pitch an ad to gays.

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Blair war dossier ‘Nothing new’.

From the London Mirror Tuesday Sept 24, 2002

[snip] … But the contents of the report were dismissed as “nothing new” by critics and military experts.

Major Charles Heyman, editor of military bible Jane’s World Armies, said: “It does not produce any convincing evidence, or any ‘killer fact’, that says that Saddam Hussein has to be taken out straight away.”

And Thomas Withington, defence analyst with King’s College, London, said a lot of the information was old material re-hashed adding: “Nothing staggering, is it?”

Labour MP and former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle said: “There are no new killer facts in this document.”
“The dossier is a judgement. It’s full of unsubstantiated assertions and allegations. There is nothing we don’t already know.”

Backbench MP George Galloway, a vocal critic of action against Iraq, demanded the return of UN weapons inspectors and called the claims in the dossier “pulp fiction“….

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Second judge declares federal death penalty unconstitutional.

A second federal judge has ruled the federal death penalty unconstitutional. Judge William Sessions of Vermont found the federal death… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

Indeed, most of the planet looks at the death penalty as the cruel and barbaric relic of the Dark Ages that it is.

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Temperature in San Fernando Valley plunges to 102!

Ah yes, this heat wave was supposed to end two-three days ago.  This morning I awoke to find, oh, about half a billion Argentina ants swarming over the cat food.  And I live on the third floor.  That’s a long hike for an ant.  They’ve been driven batty by the heat too.

Ah, but like the t-shirts in Phoenix say, with a skeleton leaning against a cactus with the caption “Phoenix, but it’s a DRY heat”.  Ha…. ha…. ha….

The lying rat bastard weather forecasters who have been wrong wrong wrong lately are predicting 97 degrees Wed,  then a drop to the 80’s later in the week.  Ahem, for their own safety, they better be correct…

I look forward to the El Nino deluges.

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Santa Monica City Council to vote on homeless policy

Private organizations currently feed many homeless people in Santa Monica, CA, a city long known for helping the homeless and poor.  Now, some residents and businesses are complaining there are too many homeless.

Under pressure from the city’s business community to do something, the Santa Monica City Council plans to vote tonight on two ordinances.

One would seek to limit free outdoor meals by requiring groups serving 150 or more meals to adhere to community event laws and county health standards. Some activists say such a rule would effectively ban the food giveaways.

The other proposal would make it illegal to sit or lie down in downtown doorways.

Note that the City is not paying for the food these organizations are providing.  One organizer said,  “At a time when government resources are stretched to the max, the Santa Monica City Council is contemplating an action that will criminalize private charity and compassion.”

The vote takes place tonight and may come down to the two Greens on the council voting No, and the remaining three members voting Yes.  Council meetings are broadcast locally on KCRW 89.9 starting at 8 PM and should be, uh,” lively and spirited.”

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Rot in Hell, El Paso Gas…

The nation’s biggest natural gas pipeline company illegally manipulated the California market during the energy crisis, a federal regulatory judge said Monday in a ruling that could bolster wide-ranging claims for refunds.

El Paso Corp. used a variety of strategies in 2000-01 to withhold an average of at least 345 million cubic feet of natural gas a day from California customers, creating an artificial shortage that drove up prices, concluded Judge Curtis L. Wagner Jr. of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Among the maneuvers, he said: El Paso failed to use 21% of the capacity of its pipeline to the state.

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Yow…

Gunmen holding Hindu temple in western India, kill at least 23

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John Lennon would be pleased

Blair report on Iraq a non-event

One of the most prominent skeptics, the Labor legislator Diane Abbott, said the report was unpersuasive and offered nothing new.

“Tony Blair will have to do better than this if he wants to convince the British public to go to war,” she said. Protesters in an open-top bus outside the House of Commons loudly sang John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.”

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Jury Nullification to be on South Dakota ballot

Jury nullification means a jury can ignore laws they deem to be vindictive or unwise.  This is an important vote, and one to watch.

In November, voters in South Dakota will decide whether to give tax protesters, medical marijuana users and other criminal defendants a new right. A proposed constitutional amendment would allow defendants there to concede their guilt but nonetheless argue for acquittal on the grounds that the law under which they were charged is misguided or draconian.

The South Dakota initiative, known as Amendment A, is the next step in a centuries-old debate about the role of juries in deciding not just the facts of a case but also the wisdom of the law in question. The shorthand term for the complex subject is jury nullification.

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Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Book and related weblog, by Howard Rheingold

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks.

The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and “swarming” tactics in the “battle of Seattle.” A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

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Noelle Bush will be test case

First there was a frantic call to police claiming that the ”princess,” Noelle Bush, had been caught at her drug rehabilitation center with crack cocaine, that she had been caught repeatedly and never punished “because of who she is.”

In an Orlando courtroom, a judge will decide this week whether employees of the drug treatment center will have to testify against Bush and help prosecutors put her in prison on felony charges of possessing crack cocaine

Underlying the case is another simmering question that may never be answered but could haunt the governor as he runs for reelection: Is Noelle Bush enjoying favored treatment? Or, as her lawyer maintains, is she being targeted because she is American “royalty”?

Uh, considering she hasn’t even been arrested yet would tilt me to the “favored treatment” theory.  You suppose this will make her daddy, Gov. Jeb Bush more understanding about addiction and less likely to want to prove how tough he is on crime?

Maybe you really do reap what you sow.  Sow harsh prison terms for small amounts of crack cocaine and reap your daughter going to prison for it. 

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Bill Simon hasn’t done anything dumb lately

Humorists are crestfallen that Simon, Republican candidate for California Governor, hasn’t done anything appallingly simple-minded for several days now.  However, they remain hopeful…

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