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May 31, 2007

A Job Worth Having?

An I was only doing my job alert as a company cuts off the electric power for an unpaid bill - for a woman on an oxygen machine

A gravely ill woman dependent on an oxygen machine died after a power company confronted her over an unpaid bill for £62 and cut off her electricity supply.

Folole Muliaga, 44, who suffered from heart and lung disorders, begged the contractor to switch the electricity back on. But, with the alarm of her oxygen machine sounding, he told her that he was only doing his job.

Within ten minutes she began to suffer a severe headache and said that she could not see. She died within two hours.

For shame - how cam amyone protest that "they were only doing their job" and kill somebody?

Looks like a case of collective amnesia coupled with the "fear of being fired".

If our "modern society" uses the "fear factor" to ensure their workers are obedient - and then causes other peoples deaths - are they not culpable?


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May 13, 2007

Women Must Submit

I've already opined that I dislike the The Silence of the Left with regards to the "free pass" that it gives to Islam in the name of "multiculturalism" - and also objected to fact that the women on the left are not standing up for womens rights in countries that have - *ahem* - shall we say draconian laws to keep women in their place.

Now it seems that other people are getting with the programme and asking some questions that should be ansewered

If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women's centers at our major colleges and universities, you'll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today's campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.

It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before September 11, 2001, many women's groups protested the brutalities of the Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women's issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority.

Why not?


Why not indeed?

Why do the left give a "free pass" to "gender oppression" in the Muslim world?


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May 12, 2007

Put a Necktie on that Pig!

First neckties and now pork - as the lowly swine somehow gets blamed for all mens evils.

Its simple you see - according to the ancient doctrines of some elder religion "if you eat a pig you become like a pig"

I am astonished - I thought all that "macrocosm vs microcosm" stuff went out of fashion ages ago - but apparently not.

Food and drink have direct effect on our health. That is why Allah (the one and only God) has prescribed regulations about our food and drink. Islam lays great emphasis on our physical as well as moral health, because both of these are equally important for a healthy society.

The abstention from eating pork is one of the steps taken by Islam to practise hygiene and to attain purity of soul. There is a saying in English that "a man becomes what he eats". According to physicians and medical experts, pork is a harmful diet. Consumption of swine-flesh creates lowliness in character and destroys moral and spiritual faculties in a man.

The Qur’an has prohibited the swine-flesh, hence the Muslims would not dare touch it. The Bible has also forbidden swine-flesh, but Christians disregarded this order and started consuming it.

The life of a man is a compound of body and soul. Anything, which is harmful for the body, hurts the soul as well.

Consumption of swine-flesh reduces the feeling of shame and as such the standard of modesty. Those nations, which consume pork habitually, have a low standard of morality with the result that virginity, chastity and bashfulness are becoming a thing of the past.

Since the Western nations have become addicted to wine and pork, sexual freedom with all its attendant evils has got ingrained in their culture.

Reliable medical doctors and social scientists are able to realise how those food and drinks forbidden by Islam are harmful and destructive to the human spirit and morality as well as to the physique and moral fibre of man and to verify the benefits of Islamic legislations on the subjects.


You could not make this up - pass me a bacon sandwich someone - not only am I hungry and like eating bacon sandwiches - but I am looking forward to having a "lower standard of morality" in the future ...

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May 11, 2007

Old Cold War Jigsaw

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I wrote this

Shredded documents.

They look like a mess but most crackers spies did jigsaws as a kid.

Crackers spies start by sorting by color, thickness of paper and other possible clues, then isolate chunks bit by bit and work on them. It takes a while, but once finished they can tape them together and retrieve the information quite easily.

In general, if a document is sensitive enough to shred, then it should also be worth disposing of by a security company specialising in destruction of company paperwork.

Now the idea has come back to haunt certain people - as new software technology promises to reconstruct shredded documents

Millions of files consigned to paper shredders in the late days of the East German regime will be pieced together by computer. The massive job of reassembling this puzzle from the late Cold War was performed, until now, by hand.

It's been years in the making, but finally software designed to electronically piece together some 45 million shredded documents from the East German secret police went into service in Berlin on Wednesday. Now, a puzzle that would take 30 diligent Germans 600 to 800 years to finish by hand, according to one estimate, might be solved by computer in seven.

In 1989, with the looming collapse of the Communist regime becoming increasingly evident, agents of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi feverishly plowed millions of active files through paper shredders, or just tore them up by hand.

Rights activists interrupted the project and rescued a total of 16,250 garbage bags full of scraps. But rescuing the history on those sheets of paper amounted to an absurdly difficult jigsaw puzzle. By 2000, no more than 323 sacks were legible again -- reconstructed by a team of 15 people working in Nuremburg -- leaving 15,927 to go. So the German government promised money to any group that could plausibly deal with the remaining tons of paper.

The Fraunhofer Institute won the contract in 2003, and began a pilot phase of the project on Wednesday. Four hundred sacks of scraps will be scanned, front and back, and newly-refined software will try to arrange the digitized fragments according to shape, texture, ink color, handwriting style and recognizable official stamps.


It will be interesting to see how many facts about the Cold War will be revealed by this - if it works of course ...

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May 10, 2007

Old Cold War Games

Interesting tale of how fighters were scrambled to intercept Russian spyplanes over interbational waters - in 2007 ...

Two Bears were spotted during a major Royal Navy exercise to the north of the Outer Hebrides. Commanders believe they were planning to spy on the warships, including the aircraft carrier Illustrious.

Two Tornado F3 fighters took off from RAF Leuchars in Fife and intercepted the Bears in international airspace.

The pilots were close enough to wave but there was no radio contact.

After shadowing the Russians for some 15 minutes, they watched as the giant bombers turned and headed home to their base in Murmansk. In similar skirmishes during the 1970s and 80s, Soviet spies were sometimes spotted watching from the perimeter of RAF stations to time exactly how long it took jets to take off and intercept Bear bombers, probing the UK's defences and testing the response.

While such visits from the Russians have become extremely rare, the latest one is a reminder that Moscow's long-term ambitions are not entirely clear and that the old Cold War rivalries could well resurface.


Is this the "Old Cold War" or the "Old Cold War Reheated" as the article suggests - or is the New Cold War a continuation of the Old Cold War by other means?

After all certain countries from the "Old Cold War" are quite happy to supply certain countries from the "New Cold War" with nuclear technology and arms - so how can we be sure this isn't the "Old Cold War" with a new set of proxy client states?


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May 6, 2007

Inner Space Wormhole

Or maybe not ...as Mathematicians Design Invisible Tunnel

New calculations show how to make an electromagnetic "wormhole"—a tube that is invisible from the sides but allows light to shine down the center.

The concept is a twist on a spherical cloak of invisibility proposed last year. Such a device would be made of metamaterial, a thicket of metal rings or other shapes that bends light in funny ways. A hollow shell of metamaterial could in principle channel light around its inner space without slowing the light down, rendering that hidey-hole invisible to the outside world.


I love this daft science stuff ... because one day - it might be the future ...

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