Call Mickey

Oh no! I'm gonna be dead soon! I'm gonna end up dead and poor! I won't be famous! No more adventurous travels and encounters with mesmerizing strangers!! Pluto's position was just right, and I acted accordingly. I started this blog! All which has been promised to me, by daily newspapers, colorfull magazines and trusted astrologers in their horoscopes can't be true anymore. Oh no, I'm doomed. Just 8 planets left in the solar system!
Somebody better call Mickey.
Pluto got lost.

String Theory

Oh, look at little JonBenet! How cute, dancing in her pink cowboy boots.
It reminds me of the old days, when the Netherlands were depicted as the biggest provider of childporn on the entire planet. The law in the Netherlands had its age limit for erotic imagery at 16 years. In the United states this was 18, so the Dutch were producing and exporting childporn like there was no tomorrow as far as the USA was concerned. Obviously the Dutch laws got changed in a hurry, and now the Netherlands is in line with their Big Brother, where productions like "Real College Girls", "Sorority Initiation", and simular see the light, which is not a problem because the actresses only pretend they are underage. Not quite the age of JonBenet, but as far from 18 as they can get away with.
Another element in this discussion is the discrepancy between what people can touch, and what other people want to sell. Is a piercing or a tattoo as good as a drivers license when spotted all but naked on a sunny beach? Oh, wait, my mistake. In the USA you can drive half a ton of killing machine all over the public space long before you are considered mature enought to decide what to do or don't in your own bedroom.
But what is the age limit for a mobile phone, for lipstick, for a tiny and rather sexy g-string, which are being marketed to 13 year olds? The more commerce discovers the market of adolescents and wraps these children like tasty candy, the more testosterone plagued humanoids are tempted to take a bite. The fact that these young girls are physically capable of reproduction, and not beyond experimenting on the impact they have on the opposite sexe just adds to this explosive mixture. So there should be some limit to what you can try to sell to children, for if you market them stiletto heels to go with their stockings, garterbelt and fancy string, you are asking for a lot of trouble.
I'm not questioning the need to protect youngsters against predatory behaviour of dirty old men, with or without digital camera. I even think an age of 18 is a better one than 16 and for my part it could be raised to 21. But we must realise such an age is pretty arbitrairy because children differ as much from each other in the maturity of their thoughts and reason as aults do. It's pretty local as well. "Adolescent pregnancy is alarmingly common in many countries" [source] not to mention adolescent sex which does not lead to pregnancy. In the age of Aids 'young' (and unblemished) frequently stands for 'safe' and real men don't wear rubbers in significant parts of the world.
Where does the abuse of children begin, what exactely qualifies? Is a nude girl, age 17, on beach somewhere in Poland abused more then some girl like JonBenet, forced into adult behaviour and preteen beauty contest competitions? Will a girl without string be as much a social outcast as a boy without expensive brand on his feet and isn't commerce abusing our children in a general and largely neglected way?
In a later fase I might expand this to the realm of (online) gaming, also know as Heroinware

Bones

There is no war in Iraq, something like this is commonly refered to as an occupation. After a war is won, territories get occupied. The Netherlands were occupied during World War II. The (rather limited) opposition to that occupation was called The Resistance, often The Undergound allthough the Germans might have called it an insurgency. Look where it got them.
Germany got occupied after World War II. A chunk of it got a fairly democratic government, albeit no army right away, another chunk got a totalitarian boot in it's neck and became Democratic in nothing but name. This took a while to topple over but after Poland it did and the domino effect so dreaded in Asia finally came to pass in Europe, and so much for the better.
Allright, lets light the candles, shake up the bones, cast them on a sheet covered with astrological symbols and do some future prediction for dummies.
So, this occupation will come to an end. Even the USA doesn't have the stamina to persist in this insanity.
Some day the government will be deemed democratic, appropriate and satisfactory, allthough it will not be, not even by a long shot[1]. Apart from the three northern provinces, aka Kurdistan, where they seem to have a better grip.
Some day the Iraqi army will be deemed qualified enough, allthough it will not be, not even by a long shot. They don't even have an army. They have subdivisions in US Armed Forces infrastructure, backed by US artillery, armor, airsupport and guided by them spooky 'advisors' much like crawled all over indochina[2].
The USA will pull out, Cheerleader News Networks will dub this 'cut and run', BushCo will blame the Democrats, who will have won back the house and/or senate in 2006, and made it impossible for him to stay the course, thereby aiding the enemy.
The full blown civil war shortly thereafter will be a humanitarian disaster, ethnic cleansing all over the place, but not for the entire area formerly known as Iraq. Shia's and Sunni's will battle over Bagdad and southern provinces, climaxing over Basra but up in the north the Kurds will close their border and declare an independant state of Kurdistan. The Turks won't like it none but the people in control of this particular slab of real estate, soaking with oil, will have a lot of leverage. The problems between Kurdistan and Turkey will be problems for the European Union.
Problem solved.
Next stop: Teheran.

[1] The Iraqi Government Is Little More Than a Group of "Talking Heads"
[2] There Is No Iraqi Army
from "7 Facts You Might Not Know about the Iraq War"

Iranian Thinking

* If you don't have weapons of mass destruction, like Iraq, you will be attacked by the United States and your population will suffer incredibly.
* If you do have weapons of mass destruction, like North Korea, yo can do whatever the fuck you want and the United States will largely ignore you. If you test long range missiles they will beef up their attempts to create some defense. Being friends with China helps, so Iran is trying to be friends with Russia.
* If you use traditional fossil fuels you will add your demands to those of China in a global market which is under pressure and when the prices skyrocket you cant compete and ruin your own economy.
* If you have nuclear powerplants you can export a lot more oil, sell it to China and boost your economy.
* In the light of climate change and global warning Nuclear energy is more and more being promoted as an alternative (which I happen to think is full blown idiocy, but that's not the point here) so obtaining nuclear energy is for the sake of the planet, while fossil fuels are not.

Some say nuclear energy is for the biggest part a marketing and public relations strategy to sell the bomb. It's not that effective, after all. The position of the United States regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions is either prooving that point or beyond all logic. Let them have their nuclear energy, make sure they don't make weapons or better, don't even want to make them for lack of need, which means the USA must abort it's aggressive stance. As far as I understand it the Iranians are quite willing to enter deals with for instance Russia about the fuel, they say to support the non proliferiation treaty, and they even seem to allow for inspections. As long as their basic rights as a nation to develop these technologies is not questioned but the West still is trying to dictate what autonomous countries can and connot strive for.
Best way would be to start talking, instead of throwing veiled threats to and fro, but that seems to be impossible for the likes of Bush &Co

Eggbeaters

Saddam Hussein is in the news again today.
"Ex-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein goes on trial again in Baghdad on Monday - this time in connection with an anti-Kurdish offensive in 1987 and 1988." [BBC].
The next couple of days we will be spammed with imagery of dead Kurds, killed by chemical weapons used on these innocent Iraqi cilvilians by the Evil Dictator. These weapons were partially released on them from choppers, provided in a way by the United States' Donald Rumsfeld. This information will not be spammed on us though. I predict it will not surface at all.
The imagery that goes with the trial will proove to us that Saddam Hussein was Evil Incarnated instead of the "usefull relation(ship)" he was in 1983, only 4 to 5 years before he started to drop bombs with chemicals on Kurds, which, I can't emphasise enough, were partially delivered by choppers sold to him by the United States, which in turn was made possible by Donald Rumsfeld.
Thats right. Kurds were killed by American eggbeaters and Rumsfeld is to blame. See "The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet"

This trial and it's imagery is probably also aimed at making friends with the Kurds, telling them that the United States, amongst others, really care about them, and the suffering they endured during the regime of Saddam Hussein. So when the Kurds form their own state as a result of the increasingly 'civil' war (oh, the irony) they won't stop selling the oil that they are sitting on, allow it's supply to be disrupted or even be used as a weapon. But this new Weapon of Mass Destruction, the Oil Weapon, is for another day.

Cheerleader News Network

The more I watch CNN while comparing it's coverage with for instance the BBC and available online resources the more disturbed I get. Reporing on the recent ruling of the unwarranted and therefor illegal surveillance by the Bush administration CNN summarises this with "a serious setback in the war on terror" instead of something along the lines of "a small victory in the fight against Big Brother" or something more neutral, balanced, conform the facts instead of their cheerleader interpretation. The ammount of programs for spying on the population of the Unites States is staggering [learn more] and turn something ominous als George Orwell's "1984" into some pale shadow of reality. The movie "Enemy of the State" (1998) [IMDB] depicted technologies from the cold war with laughable coin sized tracking devices, instead of something a little smaller, the size of an appleseed perhaps. The folks from the NSA had to actually sit in a huge and rather conspicious van, as if they even need to be close to their target these days and still it was a frightening eye opener for many viewers.
Just days before the landfall of Katrina a year ago CNN is going to air "In the Footsteps of Bin Laden", spamming viewers with images and cut-outs weeks before the broadcast takes place. They apparently don't feel the need to look back on the cause, preface or aftermath of this hurricane, a natural disaster fuelled more by the lack of adequate disaster preparation and management then by the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico. It seems as if they need to distract the American public from the failures of it's leadership and have them all look the other way. How effective the organisation of yet another Hateweek starring the notoriously elusive Osama Bin Goldstein is I cannot even begin to imagine, but I fear the worst.
Suddenly I remember the coverage of the first elections Bush jr won, if that is the proper way of putting it and the role played by CNN. Chilling. But lets stick to current affairs.
Lets get back to the Shampoo Plot, which is slowly falling apart and loosing it's credibility. Blair called Bush about the upcoming wave of arrests so he could work some PR around it but went on vacation during "the biggest threat to Britain since World War II". Many alleged plotters didn't have airline tickets, passports even. But instead of questioning these events the trusted cheerleaders of the BushCo administration jumped on some confession from a guy arrested in Bangkok, and went 10 years back in time to rehash the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a clear cut case of child abuse, by her parents, who robbed the girl of her childhood to begin with. This John Mark Karr, who reminded me of a zombie as he stood there in the flashlights, had probably experienced some hefty interrogation, got some first hand experiences with the local Thai prison system, figured a hasty retreat to the USA was in his best interest and got what he had bargained for. The Cheerleaders will probably find something new in the development of this and simular high profile, low content cases whenever friend Bush is in a predicament (again) or the Neo Conservative flock is in need for public distribution of their point of view. Coming elections, both of them, matters will most likely only get worse.