Beautiful World

Via the New York Times:

8 Are Killed by Bombings in Restive City in South Iran

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been expected to meet his cabinet in the city, but the trip was canceled Monday evening. His office said the four-day trip was canceled because of bad weather, the IRNA news agency reported Monday. The explosions occurred at the time he had been expected to make a speech in Ahwaz.

According to this BBC report:

..his office told the BBC the visit had been cancelled due to bad weather.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s media chief said the president had feared the weather would have prevented people from attending his meetings in the city.

Here’s a photo taken on the same day of the bombing. The weather doesn’t look so bad…no umbrellas, not even a breeze.

More from the Times:

A series of deadly bombs went off in Ahwaz last year, and the government accused Britain of provoking the attacks. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said in October that Iran had proof of British involvement.

Britain has repeatedly denied the accusations.

Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the interior minister, said the bombings on Tuesday were motivated by foreigners. Mr. Ahmadinejad ordered the Intelligence and Foreign Ministries to investigate “the role of foreign hands” in the bombings, the ISNA student news agency reported…

..”Iran has always been victimized by terrorism, and these blind blasts show the continuity of brutal acts against Iran by international terrorists,” he added….

…Ahwaz is the capital of Khuzestan Province and home to a Sunni Arab minority. The province borders Iraq and was battered during the Iran-Iraq war. It has remained one of the least developed regions in the country since then.

Unrest broke out in the city in April, and several people were killed after rumors spread that the government planned to relocate Arabs.

Giant Squid Photographed for First Time

The team led by Tsunemi Kubodera, from the National Science Museum in Tokyo, tracked the 26-foot long Architeuthis as it attacked prey nearly 3,000 feet deep off the coast of Japan’s Bonin islands.

“We believe this is the first time a grown giant squid has been captured on camera in its natural habitat,” said Kyoichi Mori, a marine researcher who co-authored a piece in Wednesday’s issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The camera was operated by remote control during research at the end of October 2004, Mori told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Mori said the giant squid, purplish red like its smaller brethren, attacked its quarry aggressively, calling into question the image of the animal as lethargic and slow moving.

“Contrary to belief that the giant squid is relatively inactive, the squid we captured on film actively used its enormous tentacles to go after prey,” Mori said.

“It went after some bait that we had on the end of the camera and became stuck, and left behind a tentacle” about six yards long, Mori said…

They don’t mention what kind of “bait” or “prey” was used. I hope it wasn’t a photographer.

..Jim Barry, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, has searched for giant squid on his own expeditions without luck.

“It’s the holy grail of deep sea animals,” he said. “It’s one that we have never seen alive, and now someone has video of one.”

Let me get this straight – scientists have been telling us that the giant squid is “relatively inactive” but they’ve never seen one in action before? Maybe those old sailors’ tales weren’t myths after all…

The wind was blowing pretty hard yesterday, knocking some things around and tossing garbage pails down the street. I didn’t think much of it, because I used to live in Cape May, where we call nonstop gale-force winds “April”. But apparently these winds caused some major problems.

My son was without power and hot water in his Boston dorm. My husband was giving a business presentation on the seventh floor of a Connecticut office building when part of the roof on the eighth floor collapsed from the weight of rainwater. And Neo-neocon had a bummer of a day.

We know about Chuck Yeager – but what about Joe Kittinger?

In his post The First Man In Space… Skydiving Down To Earth, Ace linked to this video and said:

So, in 1960, this cat ascends to 30km above the earth in a balloon and…. jumps. He accelerates to 900 mph (I guess terminal velocity’s a lot higher when the air is thin). He actually broke the sound barrier, without a vehicle.

He was testing to see if high-g acceleration would kill him, by the way. It didn’t, but he didn’t know that when he agreed to try it.

Here’s more about Joe Kittinger, who has “logged more than 11,000 hours of flight time in 62 different types of aircraft including 5,300 hours in jet fighters and 1,000 hours of combat flying, is a Master Parachutist with over 100 parachute jumps, made five high altitude balloon flights, and has extensive experience in low altitude helium and hot air balloons.”

Now there’s a man who needs to have a movie done about his life. I’d guess that Tommy Lee Jones could play the older Joe, but who would play the younger..?

Back in 1921, Winston Churchill described our moderate Saudi allies this way*:

In the vast deserts of Arabia, which stretch eastward and north-eastward from the neighbourhood of Mecca to the Persian Gulf and to the boundaries of Mesopotamia, there dwell the people of Nejd, powerful nomadic tribes, at the head of whom the remarkable chief Bin Saud maintains himself. This Arab chief has long been in a state of warfare, raid, and reprisal with King Hussein and with his neighbours generally. A large number of Bin Saud’s followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relation to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of the religious wars. The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practise themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette, and as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and bloodthirsty, in their own regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and to the whole institution of the pilgrimage, in which our Indian fellow-subjects are so deeply concerned.

Winston had a talent for recognizing a threat. Of course, the violent and brutal fact of Saudi society was never a secret until billions of petrodollars spread the myth of moderate Sauds. Outside of America and Britain the Saudi/Wahhabis have always been synonymous with terrorism. Muslims have been trying to tell us about them for decades.

T.E. Lawrence(of Arabia), Churchill and most of the British establishment planned to give the more moderate Hashemites control of the Middle East. So, why did they wind up giving control of Mecca and Medina to genocidal barbarians? Listen to this strangely familiar story, which reads like a colonial version of Star Wars 1, 2 & 3; T.E. Lawrence and Churchill play the Jedi and British spy Jack Philby plays the part of Darth Vader. Everyone is stuck on Tatooine:

Philby secretly began to favour Ibn Saud over Sherif Hussein as “King of the Arabs”, a difference with British policy, which was promising support for the Hashemite dynasty in the post-Ottoman world. On return Philby completed the crossing from Riyadh to Jeddah by the “backdoor” route, thus demonstrating Ibn Saud was in control of the Arabian highlands, whereas Sherif Hussein could not guarantee safe passage. Later he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society Founders Gold Medal for the desert journey. Back in Jeddah he met with an embarassed Sherif Hussein.

On 7 November 1918, four days before the Armistice, Britain and France issued the Anglo-French Declaration to the Arabs assuring self-determination. Philby felt the betrayal of this assurance, along with the Balfour Declaration and other diplomatic manouvres broke faith with the promise of a single unified Arab nation in exchange for aligning themselves with the Allies in the war against the Ottoman Turks and Central Powers.

Philby argued that Ibn Saud was a “democrat” guiding his affairs “by mutual counsel” as laid out in the Koran (Surah XLII. 37), in contrast to Lord Curzon’s “Hussein policy”. British policy on Arab affairs was wracked by rivalries between the Foreign Office and the India Office…

…He worked with T. E. Lawrence for a while, but did not share Lawrence’s views on the Hashemites. Here he met his American counterpart, Allen Dulles, who was stationed in Istanbul. At the end of 1922 Philby travelled to London for extensive meetings with all involved in the Palestinian question. They were Winston Churchill, King George, the Prince of Wales, Baron Rothschild, Wickham Steed, and Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement.

Here’s more in a left-leaning view of how Philby, Dulles and Ibn Saud worked with Hitler to wage war against the Jews:

The modern world begins, the authors suggest, at the end of World War I, when British diplomat/adventurers Jack Philby (father of Soviet spy Kim Philby and legendary Arabist) and Lawrence of Arabia endeavour to unify a bunch of warring Bedouin tribes into nationhood, best represented by Saudi Arabia. Aware that black gold (oil) lies underneath the desert sands, Philby gingerly befriends Ibn Saud, and makes him the first Saudi king. But Philby is not solely interested in empire, even his own British one; he is interested in making money, and forges an alliance with an American intelligence agent in charge of Middle Eastern affairs, Allen Dulles.

By the 1930s, Ibn Saud and Philby are secret supporters of the Nazi rise to political power in Germany, and bring Dulles, a NYC-based corporate lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, in on their scheme. It is a triple game driven by their hatred of Zionism and the Jews, motivated by their obsessive seeking of profits, and designed to completely transform the landscape of the Middle East. Philby and Dulles convince Ibn Saud to allow limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, assuring him that the numbers will never challenge or upset his control. When Jews leave Germany, their assets are confiscated by Hitler, who shares a percentage of these with dummy corporations established by Philby, Dulles, and their allies. Some of this money is used to arm Ibn Saud, and intelligence disclosures to him by Philby enable Ibn Saud to become king of Saudi Arabia over other Arab leaders supported by the British government. This double-dealing by British and American corporations continues throughout World War II, and incredibly is never halted by the Western allies, who would rather that Dulles stay in place andround up German intelligence agents after World War II’s end for the upcoming Cold War against a previous ally, the USSR. One of the reasons that Jews are so hated by this clique, which includes Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, is that many Jews were supporters of the left, anathema to corporate internationalists.”

The result of this fascist-established ‘modern world’ is that the Middle East has been ruled by barbarians for almost a century. It’s a mess that we helped to create, and one that we should begin to clean up.

[* link thanks to Kesher Talk]

On a video via the BBC and on the front page of the Standard (via Harry’s Place)

George Galloway, the “truly righteous” British/Leftist/Fascist politician who famously came to America and ‘spoke the truth to power’ is currently on a reality show called “Big Brother” pretending to be a cat, lapping up cream in “I’m Rula Lenska”‘s lap.

Galloway’s nouveau-fascist RESPECT coalition is ashamed and embarrassed. So is the BBC. They’re totally loving it at Harry’s Place.

Gee, who does Galloway resemble here?

Could it be ocicatman James Wolcott?

With Galloway’s star quickly falling, maybe this up and coming truth speaker will be the new kid in town. The world needs more comic relief.