Marine Confirms Depleted Uranium at Shannon

VARIOUS IRISH NEWS SOURCES are carrying a short snippit this afternoon concerning the ongoing debacle at Shannon Airport. I have posted previously about the issue of how Money Talks and Irish Neutrality Walks when it comes to enabling and supporting the US military to conduct unconstitutional activities at Shannon Airport.

Well now Online.ie and Breakingnews.ie are both carrying the same news flash about a Marine who claims that military cargo planes going through Shannon Airport are carrying depleted uranium ammunition. Platoon Sergeant Jim Massey said he used the substance, which becomes hazardous when fired, while serving in Iraq. He said supplies for the US military had been coming through Shannon since the first Gulf War.

I guess we shall wait to see what happens (if anything at all) with this latest piece of the puzzle coming to light. It’s not exactly a surprise to anyone is it? Well – perhaps for the Irish Government maybe

There Are No Suitable Words…

… TO DESCRIBE THE INSANITY of this situation. It’s rare that I find myself speechless, incredulous and almost imploding with frustration and rage at the same time, but an email I received today managed to achieve this. The mail was from Cranky Liberal entitled “We Need Your Help”. It was one of those mass emails sent out to probably thousands of folks, but when I read the contents of the email I literally found myself staring at the screen in complete amazement.

The folks over at Bring It On! are trying to get the word out about their new initiative. It’s called BakeSaleForBodyArmor and is basically about raising funds back in the US so that they can afford to purchase body armour for their sons and daughters who are serving in Iraq. Are you getting the implications of this? Are you now staring at the screen, re-reading the last two sentances to make sure you got it right?

The US Government “looks after” its’ soldiers so well that they put them in harms way, and don’t even equip them with the basic tools to give them some chance of survival. It falls to citizens of the US, ordinary joe and jane soaps to do cake sales in order to raise funds because they see this as the only way to improve the chances of ever seeing their loved ones again. This is so fucked up that I’m almost incandesent with rage at the insanity of it. Bush and his cronies are spending millions, billions even on the the Military, and yet the poor sods they send to the front lines in a conflict that shouldn’t even be happening don’t have basic protection? So – what does this say about the Governments’ support for the troops?

It says to me that the US Government considers the price of an average soldier to be approx $800 – since that’s the average price I found on a quick search of the Internet for military standard body armour. It says that they consider their sons and daughters are not worth the price of decent digital camera or PC. It says it all really.

I am anti-war.

I am anti-Bush

I am NOT anti-American.

I find it insane that such a nation is reduced to holding garage sales and cake sales in order to try to purchase military equipment. Although the intention is noble, I cannot understand why the American public think’s that this situation is acceptable and that resorting to such measures is the way forward. This is just fucked up beyond belief.

Further Details Emerge on “Evil Google”

I STARTED OFF BY CONDEMNING them for their move to enforce censorship for profit in China, and then based on some interesting comments on that original topic here at Howl @ The Moon! I realised it’s not quite as straight forward as that, and began to sway back into the middle again on the issue.

Now further research on this item has yielded even more disturbing information on the mechanics involved, but just as I was prepared to swing back over to my happy condemnation mode I came across a response from Google on their blog which … well you get the idea. It’s a bloody confusing issue with many sides to the story, so I’ll just present the new info here for you to digest and make your own minds up.

I came across a very good article over at Searchenginewatch.com which discussed the actual mechanics being implemented by Google as part of their implementation of Google.cn (aka “Evil Google”) Essentially I had assumed (like these guys) that the Chinese Government provided a list of ‘banned’ or ‘dodgy’ keywords and then the search engine was supposed to filter them out. The truth however is much weirder.
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Experimental Pervasive Communication

I’VE BEEN TAGGED – which is a first for me! The folks over at Less People, Less Idiots are conducting an experiment in online pervasive communication – you can read all about it over here. Essentially it involves distributing a central message and (similar to a chain mail) asking that the message be forwarded on. This will then be tracked to see how pervasive the message becomes and how many other sites take up the call and publish it.

The only requirement from participants is that we publish a single post with the exact message reproduced on our site, and that we then ‘tag’ some other folks to see if they are interested in doing likewise. Well – I’m all for experimentation, so here goes…

Mother of all memes

1) I would like to see the Internet used to empower the individual.

2) I wish that everyone would recognize that we are all stuck on this planet together and we need to work with each other to be able to survive. We do not have a backup planet.

3) I believe the news media should present us with the actual facts of any news event, and allow each of us to decide how to interpret the facts, without the media filtering or slanting the information.

If you have been tagged on the following dates, report to the top post on less people less idiots, and enter the information requested.

Tag Dates:

02/04/06
02/18/06
03/04/06
03/18//06

Visit this page for more details.

The target sites I’ve selected to include in this little experiment are as follows:-
Illoluv
Tor’s Rants
The Lone Codeman
With Sticks and Stones

Google Censorship Debate – More Shots Fired Today!

THE DEBATE RAGES ON over the Google decision to enter China and enforce censorship on their search engine in return for better profits and a slice of the action over in the East. Today more shots were exchanged on both sides of the argument.

The opposition waded in with evidence that Google’s new China search engine not only censors many websites that question the Chinese government but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo! by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes. It also appears that CNET News.com has found that contrary to Google founder Sergey Brin’s promise to inform users when their search results are censored, the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it.

Still, Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, has lept to Googles’ defence (weirdly enough considering the latest round of competition between the two companies) and argued that state censorship was no reason for technology companies not to do business in China.

Weirder still is the fact that the US Government has invited Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco to Capitol Hill for a meeting on U.S. business practices and censorship in China. Given the recent track record of the Americans in this respect (homeland security, patriot act, domestic spying, illegal CIA detention centers in Europe) I’m not exactly holding my breath on this one.

This argument is a long way from over folks, but the plain truth of the matter is that censorship is wrong, no matter how you wrap it up. Enforcing and promoting censorship for profit is about as wrong as you can get in my book.

Life Is Not A Sound Bite…

… AND NEITHER IS THIS WEBSITE. More Importantly – it never will be! Don’t believe the hype folks. The world is collectively trying to get you to believe that life is a soundbite, that less is more, and that everything must be smaller, faster, more efficient in order to be better. It’s all bullshit however and if we are to have any hope of getting beyond the Illusion of Truth to the actual reality we inhabit, then we must challenge this status quo. Why now you may ask? Well it’s a combination of several things actually, but it all began to take shape in my head a few nights ago when I was stopped in the street by a perfect stranger who asked me a very personal question out of the blue, a heart felt question if you will, and when I realised they were serious and wanted an answer I thought about it for a while, answered as honestly as I could and then carried on my way… I was kind of shocked that this had happened at all; it’s never happened before, but it got me thinking and we all know that’s a dangerous thing right?

I’ll deal with the question later and more importantly the answer, but let me throw some other things into the mix as well. You see, today is an occasion of sorts. On the one hand Howl @ The Moon! is nearly one year old and on the other hand it’s also my birthday. It’s a milestone birthday according to some, the kind where you find yourself looking back on life, considering where things are at right now and contemplating what lies ahead. In this respect I’ve decided to put forth my reasoning for arguing against the soundbite. I’ve also been reviewing some of the interesting content and discussions which have taken place here in the last year and it’s reminded me of some things which are appropriate to this article. If you find yourself among the legions of hopeless who believe the hype, the folks who can’t handle an article which takes more time to read than a goldfish takes to swim a circle, the walking talking attention deficit disorders who have bought into all the directives and behave like good little sheep to bolster all those wonderful statistics – then by all means continue your pointlessness and skip over to another site and admire the pretty graphics.

If on the other hand you want to delve deeper into this issue, if you are prepared to consider an alternative to being driven in a singular direction and have become used to my Chaos Thinking approach to things – then you are in for a treat and I hope to teach you something useful which you actually already knew, deep down, but just forgot for a while.

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Close Your Eyes And Make Babies!

JUST TO PROVE THAT the domain of the religious whackjob is not restricted to the far or extreme right, or indeed christianity for that matter, Fletch sent me some info about a nutcase called Rashad Hassan Khalil who claims that “being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage”. The Egyptian cleric’s controversial fatwa has uncovered a rift among Islamic scholars.

Bottom line folks – there are more than enough nutjobs to go around, and when it comes to religion – it doesn’t matter which side of the fence you sit on, left or right, christian or muslim… there seems to be an endless supply of headbangers to continue the age old tradition of talking shite