JOURNEY THROUGH UNIFIL #1 -ENGLISH

A Lebanese view of UNIFIL, interesting.

Tom Lehrer on Sociology

Thanks to a link on SDA

Computers....mutter, mutter

No interesting posts today, been having computer issues, so I bought a new hard drive, went to install, gee no screws to mount it, back to the computer shop, get screws, go home, (change kid's diaper) mount new harddrive and start to install a clean version of Vista on the new drive.
I am stunned it worked first time! Then I hooked up both hard drives and the computer booted up on the new drive and still had the old one. Have spent the last 6 hrs swapping data and upgrading software, sorting out all the minor but nagging stuff. Things seem to be working, but this is Microsoft so who knows what will go wrong........

Turkey Accused of Using Chemical Weapons against PKK

Hmmm seems the Turkish government might have some very broad double standards about human rights. Seems they might have used chemical weapons on the PPK

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using
It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts.
The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings. Turkish-Kurdish human rights activists believe the people in the photos are eight members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) underground movement, who are thought to have been killed in September 2009. more here

What’s the Turks score card, let me see:
Kurds plus Human rights = no
Palestinians plus human rights = yes (As long as they don’t live in Turkey)
Armenian plus human rights = Well a 100 years have passed, maybe we might think about saying sorry for that thing we really didn’t do.

There is a lot I like about the Turkish people, but you can’t fight a nasty war against the Kurds and suppress them and then help create international incidents so you can criticize Israel for far less.

Welcome to Canada, eh?

Ok I am screwed, my wife who is from Malaysia, says that she does not have to go into the wilds to see animals as the Lord/Allah/ Great Spirit/ etc, etc will provide by having the animals cross in front of her.
So far she has been pretty successful, bears, coyotes, skunks, gophers, marmots, muskrats, raccoons and even a cougar crossing the road (5 seconds after we had told her they are around but you never see one). She saw a beaver swimming by which I argued was not a “Sign from god” but I told her that her seeing a beaver cross the road would be a sign. Guess I lose and will be going to Church on Sunday….sigh.

We can't fight casino money laundering says RCMP

Well maybe if the government had spent some of the 2 billion used for the firearms registry to build up a high tech crime branch then yes they could tackle this area. It was made clear to the governments that the casino’s were going to be the best place to launder money for organized crime, but the lure or jobs and easy tax money won out. The fact that they didn’t do anything to deal with this threat that they knew was coming just shows how short sighted and warped senior levels of government and the RCMP are.
You can read more here on the whining of why they can’t do what they are supposed to be doing.

Taliban behind 76 percent of civilian deaths in Afghanistan: UN

A man waits to receive treatment from a doctor for injuries sustained during a suicide bomb attack in an Afghan hospital on July 18, 2010 in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I await with baited breath Jack Layton' outrage on National TV about this.

Taliban behind 76 percent of civilian deaths in Afghanistan: UN
By Bill RoggioAugust 10, 2010 6:35 PM
According to statistics compiled by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) the Taliban have intensified their attacks against civilians while Coalition and Afghan forces have dramatically reduced the number of civilian deaths. The Taliban are responsible for 76 percent of of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan, while Coalition and Afghan forces are responsible for just 12 percent of the civilian deaths.

The Taliban have stepped up attacks against civilians with targeted assassinations against "teachers, nurses, doctors, tribal elders, community leaders, provincial and district officials, other civilians including children, and civilians working for international military forces and international organizations." Read the full UN report, portions of which are excerpted below, as well as some commentary by me on this topic at The Weekly Standard

Among those killed or injured by the Taliban and other AGEs were 55 per cent more children than in 2009, along with six per cent more women. Casualties attributed to Pro-Government Forces (PGF) fell 30 per cent during the same period, driven by a 64 per cent decline in deaths and injuries caused by aerial attacks.

Read more:

Russia + Uruguay = barbecue

Never would I guess that Uruguay is the major supplier of meat to Russia, which apparently imports around 31.7% of all the meat from Latin America. The world never fails to amaze me!
On a similar note I buy an excellent Beef jerky in 150 mile house which is made in Beaver Valley. Beaver Valley is on the road from 150mile house to Likely. Talking to my cousin who lives up there and raise Bison, the beef for the Jerky comes from Argentina as it is cheaper than the beef from the local ranches. Apparently the issues is a lack of government approved Abattoirs and/or the cost of licensing and meeting the regulations

Coming out of the gun closet

Post 1.

Actually I “came out” quite a few years ago. Lesson learned, if you act like what you do is wrong, then people will build on that feeling even if there is nothing wrong with what you are doing. I thought I would do a series of posts to explain to the lay person about guns, gunowners, statistics, politics and laws of Canada. I will try to do it by the questions I am often asked. I hope you find the information and the format useful.

1. Question; Why do you own a gun?
Simple and short answer, I like them, I like shooting them, figuring out how they work and trying to hit the target. I also own some for protection from predators while I work and hike. Some people own guns for self-defence, yes even in Canada and it’s not as illegal as you think, this subject though deserves a post of itself. Which I will do later.

2. Question: Why do people collect guns?
For the same reasons people collect music boxes, banks, coins, cars, spoons, hockey cards, stamps or any other manner of things. Guns can be a good representation of the culture they came from, a German Luger is a complex piece made in that old world craftsman sort of way, each piece hand fitted to the next, a Russian TT-33 is rough, strong and no nonsense, similar to the Soviet Union that produced them. Each one has a story to tell. The mechanics of how it works, how it came to be is fascinating. Imagine something that has to move easily, suddenly absorb and lock up 50,000 pounds per square inch (psi) and then release itself and cycle another bullet smoothly to repeat, all using a simple spring, a chemical reaction and some mechanical advantage.
Many people collect guns from certain periods of history, some are early 17th century, others the Napoleonic period. The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th saw a blizzard of new designs and new ideas, each causing the ones just before it to be obsolete, similar in nature to the lightening fast development of the personal computer. As mentioned each design and type reflects the culture and the technology of the period and place it came from.

3. Question; How many gun owners in Canada?
An excellent question with a less than clear answer. Under the current licensing system (PAL) there were 1,863,356 licensed firearm owners in Canada as of 2008. Yet in around 1995 there was close to 4 million firearm holders under the old system (FAC) almost half of the gun owners in Canada refused to comply with the new system, one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in our history and not a note of it in the media, interesting eh? There is also approx. 4,000 firearm businesses in Canada to support them, the majority being small family owned businesses.

The next post in this series
Part II
Part III

The business end of a Warthog

This is the end of a Warthog you will never want to meet. I don’t always agree with Michael Yon but his photography is outstanding. You can see more of his work at his site or on Facebook.

The day after the marathon

Ok , this made me chuckle. I think a few of you runners out there will concur with this ad.

That pesky math

This is another reason why I don't take the Global warming/Climate change types to seriously. I am okay with being labelled a “denier” it puts me in good company with people like Galileo and the others. If you want to convince me, get your numbers right, ditch Al Gore and David Suzuki, publish the raw data sets for all to see, pick apart and review. Then I might believe in it.

Settled science?: Could all of the percentages below really be correct?

A huge math problem, and sanity check, for alarmists: If you could ever sort out the top hundred natural and anthropogenic causes of the 20th century warming, the sum of the contributions would have to be about 100%. If you get a number like 1200%, something's wrong.

more

Pemberton Slide photo's

This slide is being compared to the Hope slide as the second largest in BC, , I am thankfully the naturally created dam broke apart slowly as it removed the flood risk to the people living in the valley. I used to party at the Meager Creek hotsprings back in the 80’s I hope they are still useable after this.

More stunning pictures here

A little help for Aisha

Good news for Aisha, the girl who had nose cut off by the Taliban She is getting her face reconstructed in the US for free. I am happy for her, she has done all she can to show the world the true face of the Taliban, I am not sure many are listening though. For her life will get a little easier and I suspect she has the will and enough new found friends to survive. But there are thousands of woman in her same situation and if the Taliban succeed in winning this war, we will cast Afghanistan into the hellhole which it will likely suck it’s neighbours into as well.


"Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years," Time's Managing Editor Richard Stengel wrote in an editorial accompanying the August 9 edition of the magazine.
Aisha, whose ears were also hacked off in the attack last year in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, was taken in by the American Provincial Reconstruction Team for Uruzgan and the Women for Afghan Women (WAW) non-governmental organization after being left for dead.
The Grossman Burn Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian hospital in California which provides surgical procedures to victims of serious injuries worldwide, said Aisha would be treated for free.
See the rest here

Update

The Taliban respond:

If the Taliban are honest about this part,

As far as the story of Aisha is concerned, Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has condemned this barbaric, inhumane and unislamic act and declare that this case has never been forwarded to any court or persons of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan uses Shariate law to solve any internal or human right issues. Shariat law promotes peace and justice to the society, not hatered and cruelty.
then I sure wouldn't want to be the in-laws who cut off this young woman's ears and nose.

In sacred Islamic law, cutting of human ears and noses whether the human is alive or dead is illegal and prohibited. In many hadith from Muhammad PBUH**, cutting of noses, ears and lips of a dead unbeliever is prohibited so how can Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan carry this act out especially when the person to whom it is done is alive and Muslim. Under shariate law if someone carries out this heinous act, the same thing will be done to the criminal that carried out this act.
I await a Voice of Jihad missive on their fate.

Also, it seems that translators for ISAF forces may not be the ONLY ones who have to worry now:

We also call on Afghani media to stop spreading the lies of Islam hating western media by becoming their translators. Journalism is an important duty so stop wrongly using it.
I await journalism organizations to bash the Taliban on this threat.

Bottom line: We see the Taliban are using a timely and newsworthy issue to make it look as if the Western media are lying, especially when there are bad things being done in the name of cultural conservatism, something the Taliban would love to see more of (statements like this notwithstanding).

Read more: http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/archives/2010/08/taliban_disses_time_magazine_c.php#ixzz0wGBfWzQn