Good News: King George Says Civil War Unlikely

MOVE ALONG, FOLKS. NOTHING TO SEE HEAR. Our Leader assures us that civil war is unlikely.

ABC News: BUSH: I don’t buy your premise that there’s going to be a civil war. There’s no question that the bomber of the mosque is trying to create sectarian violence, and there’s no question there was reaction to it. On the other hand, I had the duty, which I did, to call these leaders, Shi’a and Sunni leaders, as well as Kurdish leaders. And the response was that we understand this is a moment that we’ve got to make a choice if we’re going to have sectarian strife or whether or not we’re going to unify. And I heard loud and clear that they understand that they’re going to choose unification, and we’re going to help them do so.

So there you have it. In Baghdad alone 434 Iraqis have been killed in one week from sectarian violence, but there’s NOT going to be a civil war, dammit! Thus sayeth the Commander-In-Chimp.

Bush later went on to state that the sky is not blue, up is down, and the world is now safer from terrorists.

Update: And Dick Cheney is a safe hunter.

The Donnas: I Am In Love,…

…ESPECIALLY WITH BRETT ANDERSON (lead vocals). She’s the lovely lass on the far right of that lucky red couch. Moving left we have Allison Robertson (guitar), Maya Ford (bass) and Torry Castellano (drums). I discovered them a couple of years ago, but they’ve been together since 1997. In 1998 they released their first CD, The Donnas, and have come out with five albums since then. They also released a disc using an alternate name, ‘The Electrocutes’, titled Steal Yer Lunch Money in 1999.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Donnas, they hail from the San Francisco area and have known each other since high school, when they first started performing together as a garage band. They started off having a definite punk sound, but it has evolved into more of a hard rock style with noticeable metal around the edges. Their most recent disc, Gold Medal, was released in October 2004 and has most of the stylings of which I previously described their later work as. I love too many of their songs to list them all, but a few faves of mine are (in no particular order): “Do You Wanna Hit It?”, “Fall Behind Me”, Pass It Around”, “Take It Off”, “Hot Boxin’”, “I Wanna Be a Unabomber”, “Too Fast For Love” (Mötley Crüe cover), and “Too Bad About Your Girl”.

Obviously I’m not letting you in on a new breakout band, and they don’t even have a new release, so why am I telling you about them right now? Like I said at the beginning, I am in love. These chicks rock. You can go to both TheDonnas.com and TheDonnasMedia.com to get a decent audio/visual sampling of these gals. They are all easy on the eyes, but the enchantress Brett is in heavy rotation in my dreams and fantasies. What more can I say except that she is definitely a treat for both the eyes and the ears. However, lest I don’t emphasize it enough, it’s the music that matters. The Donnas are NOT a “girl” band. They are a ROCK band. And rock they most certainly do. For those of you who might disagree with me, keep it to yourself! Don’t make me go CAPSLOCK ON YOUR ASS!

How Stupid Do You Have To Be?

I’VE BEEN FOLLOWING THIS STORY about a group of Nigerian criminals who were arrested recently in Holland. In a previous article I made the point that you really would have to be pretty stupid to fall for these scams… but it seems there is an endless supply of stupidity when it comes to human greed.

In a follow up story, Dutch police say they are targeting another 23 Nigerian gangs after the arrest of 12 suspects as part of a joint US/Dutch investigation into 419 money-making schemes. Apparently, the arrests didn’t go unnoticed with the 419 community. The number of fraudulent mails with Dutch mobile phone numbers has dropped noticeably since last week. However, fraudulent activities are expected to resume soon.

As for the victims of these crimes… well I have to say I’m surprised by this one story in particular. A victim of the recent scams turns out to be a well known New York orthopedic surgeon, who received a letter that he inherited money from a relative he had never heard of. The scammers talked him into handing over $60,000 in advance fees. I have to assume that this guy is reasonably intelligent and well educated – given his occupation – so how is it he still fell for such an obvious scam and parted with hard cash?

I think it comes down to a basic greed thing. He was greedy, and he wanted more. So – a valuable lesson then… it’s not just stupid people who get caught by these scammers, it’s greedy ones too. Hmm – maybe there should be some awards for the most outrageous scam and the dumbest victims?

The Fix For A Nasty RSS Bug In Wordpress V2.01

I DISCOVERED A NASTY BUG with Wordpress V2.01 tonight, which was causing all RSS feeds to only publish comments and headlines instead of actual post content. Needless to say I was surprised at such a massive issue getting through the testing process, but even more surprised that there was no official word on a fix for it (at least as far as I could tell).

I went to the trusty internet for help, and some searching for key phrases delivered up a link to the cure. Essentially a single line of code needed to be replaced in the classes.php file from the WP-Includes folder. Once you replace this line and upload the new file to your server the problem is fixed, however you still need to do another little thing before you will see the fruits of your labour.

Full information on this bug track is available if you know where to look, however what I also discovered is that in order to get the new line of code to work, the ‘rewrite’ rules need to be flushed out of cache. The easiest way I found to do this is to simply go to your ADMIN/OPTIONS/PERMALINK page and update the permalink structure from whatever it is, to something else, and then back again to it’s original setting. This will force the rewrite rules to be flushed and then your site should be publishing full content again via RSS feeds.

I hope this little technical interlude is useful to those who (like me) got absolutely nowhere on the official wordpress support forums, or got lost trying to use the insane search engine now residing there. Thankfully the big bad internet came to the rescue, again!

Is It Okay To Call This Thing A Civil War Yet?

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Violence killed at least 29 people Sunday, including three American soldiers, and mortar fire rumbled through the heart of Baghdad after sundown despite stringent security measures imposed after an explosion of sectarian violence.

(snip)

The vehicle ban, which followed a curfew that kept everyone in the Baghdad region inside for two days, was part of emergency measures imposed after Wednesday’s bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra triggered a wave of reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques and clerics, pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war. (Emphasis mine)

How many people have to die for this violence to be officially labelled for what it is, i.e., a CIVIL WAR? What “brink” needs to be crossed? We have one large portion of the Iraqi populace, the Shi’ites, engaged in mortal combat with another large portion of the Iraqi populace, the Sunnis. Thousands have already died because of this intranational conflict. Sounds like a civil war to me. Because there are no real fronts of which to speak or lines on a map moving from side to side, does it NOT make it war?

The world press seems to be following the American media’s narrative on this story, who in turn are having it spoon-fed to them by the White House. It’s still an insurgency, being orchestrated by terrorists and dead-enders. It’s not an armed grassroots conflict between two groups who have centuries of bad blood between them. Heavens no! That would be a civil war, which would mean King George and his ministers fucked up even worse than previously thought, thereby fucking up a country and destabilizing an entire fucking region because of a fucked plan to further American fucking hegemony and to keep gas flowing into our fucking gas-guzzling suburban tanks. To suggest that this whole thing is a collosal fuck-up gives comfort to our enemies, therefore making you a traitor. And who wants to be labelled a traitor? Not me!

God save the King!

We Should Be Better Than This…

…BUT WE’RE NOT, IT SEEMS! Sporadic violence and a street riot erupted yesterday on the streets of Dublin. Several police officers were injured as rioters clashed in central Dublin over a disputed unionist parade. Hundreds of republican demonstrators opposed to the Love Ulster rally involving Orangemen and relatives of IRA murder victims fought running battles with gardai.

The thing is – this could have, and should have been avoided. It is suggested that GARDA management failed to anticipate (registration required, free) yesterday’s riot despite clear evidence that republicans were planning a violent assault on the small loyalist march along O’Connell Street. Why was this missed? How could they ignore this?

A More important question in my mind however is why was there a riot in the first place? Surely we are better than this? Democracy has it’s price, and allowing freedom of expression is one such price. Whether we agree or not with what the marchers have to say, they were given permission to march in our city, as long as it was a peaceful march, and what happens?.. a bunch of republican thugs start a bloody riot and all hell breaks loose across the city centre. The march was cancelled as a result.

I had thought we were better than this. I had hoped that recent experience of a growing peace in our country (which I never thought I’d see in my lifetime), of progress towards a more enlightened Ireland were bringing us closer together, but I guess it will take a decade or two, possibly a couple of generations to heal some wounds.

Fell Off The Back Of A Goat?

A SUDANESE MAN has been forced to take a goat as his “wife“, after he was caught having sex with the animal. Mr Alifi, Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat. “When I asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up”.

The poor bugger (literally!) was taken to a council of elders who ordered the man to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese Dinars (which I think is worth approximately $50/€42) for his exploits in lieu of getting the local cops involved of course. Since then the goat and her new beau haven’t been seen around much for some reason

Still – when asked for an update Mr Alifi said “We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together”. It must be love then