A Post - For Now

Quickly now...


The wheels of anonymous mob justice turn:

A man assigned the old phone number of a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer charged with murder for shooting dead an unarmed black teenager is seeking compensation, after a rash of threatening calls.

Junior Alexander Guy, 49, got his first cell phone last month. Immediately he was besieged by callers angry at George Zimmerman. "You murderer!" "You deserve to die!"

The phone rang round the clock. "At 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning I kept getting these," he told the daily Orlando Sentinel.

Zimmerman had spelled out the number to a police dispatcher in a recorded call the night of the shooting and it has since been circulated in news reports and is available on the Internet.

Guy, who eventually figured it out, told the Sentinel he was forced to move out of his home and relocate his mother who had lived with him.

"I was not only afraid for my life, I was afraid for my mother's," he said.

Related:

Zimmerman never saw the cute little boy that the TV audience did.  He saw a full-grown man, a druggy, a wannabe street fighter, the tattooed, gold-grilled, self-dubbed "No_Limit_Nigga."   

Media obfuscation may still work in the court of public opinion -- it got Obama elected in 2008 -- but it will not work in a court of law.  The truth will out.  When it does, the major media will lose a good chunk of whatever credibility they have left, and our nation may lose a good chunk of its urban real estate.

Just in time:

 

Thousands of London bus workers have voted to go on strike ahead of the 2012 Olympics, saying they want a premium for working during game time.

 

Members of the Unite union endorsed industrial action at a rate of more than nine to one Saturday, although strike dates have yet to be announced.

The union is seeking a 500 pound (approximately $775) bonus for working over the games for each of the 20,000 bus workers it represents.

It's the latest group of transit workers to demand extra money to work over game time.

 

This is the same Europe that can't go down the financial tubes fast enough. 

Enjoy the ride down.

No, it isn't a crazy notion; it's a sensible one (please see poll):

 

"The United Nations is an organization that was designed to work collectively to solve the major problems facing the world," Miller said in a statement, according to the National Post.

"If this is the type of action that the UN will be taking then I think that it is high time that we review our participation in the United Nations."

When speaking to reporters, later, Miller added: "The message should be that Canada should review its participation."

While some may have dismissed Miller's comments as absurd, maybe his idea isn't all that crazy.

The British government has recently decided to de-fund four United Nations' agencies and put three others on notice that they could face the same fate unless they improve their performance.

The United States is also taking a critical look at UN funding as part of its overall budget austerity plan with some Republicans calling for a complete withdrawal.

Maybe it's time we in Canada, join our allies and review our involvement with the international body.
Just look at some of the ridiculous and mind-blowing decisions recently made by the UN:

Last summer, they named North Korea chair of a UN disarmament conference. That's North Korea, a country that has breached a number of arms embargoes and continues to make threats to expand its nuclear weapons program.

In September, the UN allowed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address the General Assembly and spread untruths about the United States.

In November, while the international community was dealing with the human rights atrocities taking place in Syria at the hands of the Assad regime, UNESCO welcomed the embattled Arab country to its human rights committee.

And in February, Russia and China were allowed to veto a security council resolution that could have led to international military intervention in Syria.

Is this really an organization we still want to be a part of?

 

If a grandmother is a threat to the community, I demand we throw the Charter into the garbage, elect judges and make sure rotten pieces of legislation like Section 13 stay gone:

 

The province of Ontario was within its rights to press criminal charges against a grandmother who has spent 10 of the last 18 years in jail for defying court orders not to demonstrate outside abortion clinics, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Friday.

Linda Gibbons, 63, appealed to the Supreme Court last year on a technicality, arguing that disobeying a court order should not be punished under the Criminal Code.

This is the Islamic world. Start worrying about it. Now.

A mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an end to sexual harassment Friday, with the attackers overwhelming the male guardians and groping and molesting several of the female marchers in Cairo's Tahrir Square. From the ferocity of the assault, some of the victims said it appeared to have been an organized attempt to drive women out of demonstrations and trample on the pro-democracy protest movement.

There is no apartheid week for the North Korean apartheid state:

The songbun system in some ways resembles the apartheid race-based classification system of South Africa. Songbun subdivides the population of the country into 51 categories or ranks of trustworthiness and loyalty to the Kim family and North Korean state. These many categories are grouped into three broad castes: the core, wavering, and hostile classes. Kim Il-sung gave a public speech in 1958 in which he reported that the core class represented 25%, wavering class 55%, and hostile class 20% of the population.

These three classes may have affected how families fared during the Great Famine of the 1990s, which Hwang Jang-yop—the regime’s chief party ideologue who defected to South Korea in 1997— estimated may have killed 3.5 million North Koreans. In mid-1998 the World Food Program, UNICEF, Save the Children, and the European Union conducted the first country-wide survey of the nutritional condition of North Korean children. They reported that 32% of the children showed no evidence of malnutrition, 62% suffered from moderate malnutrition, and 16% suffered from severe acute malnutrition, with an error rate of 5%. While the survey had its limitations because of restrictions placed on the effort by the North Korean state, it is noteworthy that the size of the three social classes is about the same as the size of the nutritional categories. If the regime was feeding people through the public distribution system based on their songbun classification, it would be reflected in the nutritional data; and the data does show considerable coincidence. In the context of the famine, songbun may have determined who lived and who died, who ate well and who starved, and whose children suffered permanent physical (through stunting) and intellectual damage (prolonged acute malnutrition lowers IQ levels) from acute severe malnutrition. We have some evidence that the songbun system determined ration levels in the public distribution system which fed the country from the founding of the North Korean state until the deterioration of the system during the famine and its ultimate collapse.

(with great thanks)



There is something about eating a meal fifty meters above ground I find unnerving.



And now, I must go. My planet needs me.