Saturday, March 11, 2006

What really happened on 9/11?

cartoon by Steve Bell


There is a petition circulating right now which calls for the government to release all kinds of evidence connected with the events of September 11, 2001. Here is the beginning of the petition and, at the bottom of this post, a link which will take you to the full text and the signature page.

“Scholars Call for Release of 9/11 Information

“TO THE MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND
OF THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

“PLEASE TAKE NOTICE THAT,


“On Behalf of the People of the United States of America, the Undersigned Scholars for 9/11 Truth Hereby Petitions for, and hereby demands, Release of the Following kinds of documents, video and films, and physical evidence to the public for study by experts and scholars investigating the events of 9/11:


“1. Immediate release of the full Pentagon surveillance tapes, of which five frames (only) have been released via the official ASCE report, as Judicial Watch has also requested. We further demand release of the video tape seized by FBI agents minutes after the Pentagon hit, from the fuel service station near the Pentagon, as well as any other videotape which shows the 9/11 strike on the Pentagon.


“See
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1211_wirepentagon.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2000/b05012000_bt218-00.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2000/20005022a.jpg
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/fct-videos.html


“2. Immediate release of 6,899 photographs and 6,977 segments of video footage held by NIST, largely from private photographers, regarding the collapses of WTC buildings on 9/11/2001 (NIST, 2005, p. 81). In particular, all footage relating to the collapse of WTC 7 (including shots before, during and after the collapse) must be released immediately, without waiting for the NIST report on WTC 7, which is long overdue and may be prolonged indefinitely.


“3. An explanation from Vice President Richard Cheney regarding the "orders" described by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta in his testimony before The 9/11 Commission. Secretary Mineta stated that while in an underground bunker at the White House, he watched Vice President Cheney castigate a young officer for asking, as a plane drew closer and closer to the Pentagon, "Do the orders still stand?" The officer should be identified and allowed to testify at a deposition under oath.


“See http://www.911truthmovement.org/video/hamilton_win.wmv”

To read the entire petition and to add your signature online, go to: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/929981172?ltl=1142081328

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Friday, March 10, 2006

Evidence!

…that the majority of my countrymen are complete and total idiots. Not that there was not plenty of evidence before, but this is the kind of thing that makes me hold my head in my hands and sigh and finally admit that stupidity is too strong a force to be overcome by mere intelligence. The meek minded have inherited the earth.

A Gallup poll released a couple of days ago shows that more than half of Americans agree with the statement: “God created man exactly the way the Bible describes it.”

More than half. I am still in shock. The implications of how poorly educated we are and how exceedingly gullible are mind-boggling.

According to the poll, old people and Republicans are more likely than their younger or Democrat counterparts to think that Darwin’s proven theory of evolution is a pile of poo, but the telling difference comes with education.

“God created man exactly the way the Bible describes it.” In agreement: 58% of those with only a high school diploma; 25% of those with post-graduate degrees.

The poll was taken last September and asked the question like this:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings? Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process. Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process. OR, God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it.
(The options were rotated.)

12% believe in evolution without a god;
31% believe in evolution with God’s guidance; and
53% believe the Bible is literal fact.

Oh, good lord.


References:
http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002154704
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Dickhead Dutch

Europe is going mad. In 2004, France banned religious symbols from schools, claiming that items like headscarves, skullcaps and crosses were inconsistent with the principle of separation of church and state. I can’t believe they got away with it because their rule interferes with the principle of freedom of religion (and freedom in general).

Now the Netherlands is trying to pass a law banning all women, no matter what their age, from wearing burqas or niqabs (face coverings) in public. The Dutch parliament has already voted in favour of the measure, and now they are just waiting for the results of a study which is to decide whether the ban is legal under European human rights laws.

Dutch politicians are claiming that burqas and niqabs comprise a security threat. With that reasoning, we can expect a ban on trench coats, hoodies and violin cases to follow.

The Nazis cut off the beards and side curls of religious Jewish men in the streets to humiliate them. Forbidding a Muslim woman to wear the clothes that define her religious identity constitutes a similar humiliation and total disrespect.

In addition to the security issue, Dutch politicians have claimed that burqas and niqabs are insulting to people who believe in equal rights. I would be able to see their reasoning if women were being forced to wear the garments, but in an allegedly free society, forcing women not to wear them is an intolerable affront.

The Netherlands is moving away from being one of the most liberal and tolerant countries in Europe to being just another neo-fascist state.
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Thursday, March 09, 2006

Today's Prague Report

Then and now

In 1992, my starting living allowance as a Peace Corps volunteer was 5,450 Kč per month – about $200 at the time. That was about the same as my Czech colleagues at the university were making, which may have been a little bit less than average (teachers are underpaid here, too).

The Czech Republic’s average salary data for 2005 was published this week. The average salary for 2005 was about 19,075 Kč per month. At today’s exchange rate, that is $790 (US) or £455 (UK). The average salary for 2006 is projected at about 20,300 Kč per month ($840, £484).

Zkrocená hora

Brokeback Mountain opened in Czech cinemas last Thursday, and came in at #2 for its first weekend (2-5 March) in total number of viewers in the country. It ranked behind a Czech film called Jak se krotí krokodýli – “How to tame crocodiles”.

Hostel came in 6th. I have not seen the film, and don’t think I will, but I got a report on it from Tomášek. He told me that the audience in the Czech cinema had been howling with laughter at many aspects of the film, and these are the examples he cited:

  1. Amsterdam was Prague. You could see the cobblestones in the pavement, which Amsterdam does not have; there were signs in Czech in the background, and all the filmmakers did to make Prague into Amsterdam was to fill the street with bicycles.
  1. Bratislava was actually Český Krumlov.
  1. The “Slovaks” in the film were all speaking Czech.
  1. The train station that was supposed to be in a large German town was Praha hlavní nádraží – Prague main station. They had covered up the Czech on the platform signs, leaving only the German and English visible.

Cocktails

Last night Tomášek and I started out at Potrefená husa in Josefov, and moved on from there to Alcohol Bar (the bar with the straightforward name). We reminisced about the last time we had been together in Alcohol Bar.

It had to have been sometime in 2004, and I am fairly certain that it was towards the beginning of the year, either while Jean-Bertrand Aristide was being overthrown or shortly thereafter.

Tomášek and I had sat at the bar that night. We perused the cocktail list. For those of you who have not frequented the cocktail bars in Prague, their drinks lists are nearly always at least the size of novellas, and the waitresses watch you like hawks to make sure you don’t attempt to steal one. We found a drink on the menu that was named Port-au-Prince. It was the colour of a Manhattan, served in a martini glass, contained two kinds of rum and was very strong.

Tomášek and I had chosen the Port-au-Prince because the political situation in Haiti was current and so it seemed like the right thing to do. We mentioned something about Haiti to the barman, but he had no idea what we were on about. We then proceeded to ask many of the bar’s other patrons, “Do you know Aristide?” Most people just looked at us blankly. We had a fun night.

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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

My, how things have changed

I was at a birthday party on Saturday night where it was required to talk the small talk. kd got it started by asking the people around us how long they had been in Prague. None of them had been here for more than 6 months. Then the question came back:

How long have you been here?

Since 1992, except for 2 years that I spent in England.

Wow! You must have seen some serious changes.

Well, yes, Julia, I have seen some serious changes. Today I am going to write about the food situation.

When I came over in 1992 I was semi-vegetarian, meaning that I ate dairy, eggs and fish, but did not eat birds or mammals. I came with Peace Corps and they put us into host families for the 2-month period of our language training. One of my first tasks in Czech was explaining to my host family what I would and would not eat. They didn’t get it at all – the Czech diet is meat-centred and they had ever met a vegetarian before.

It was summer and the family had a beautiful fruit and vegetable garden so vegetarian meals were easy. My host mom gave me lots of organic raw vegetables (she even cut them up for me) and fruit, bread and a piece of cheese or an egg. That was perfect for breakfast and supper; I had lunch, the main meal, at school.

The women who did the cooking in school had never met a vegetarian before either, and there were 3 of us. Some days they just gave us potatoes and some cabbage, other days they prepared something special for us. I ate a lot of omelettes and fried cheese that summer; the two items were the sum total of most vegetarian menus in restaurants as well.

Then summer was over and I moved to Ústí nad Labem. Perhaps this will illustrate the situation for you: my neighbourhood grocery store did not even have a fruit and vegetable section. The big German supermarket (Plus) in the centre of town had a fruit and vegetable section which usually stocked onions, garlic, potatoes, cabbage and sometimes a carrot or two. That’s it. There were greengrocers in town, but they may as well have shut down for the winter.

I started eating meat again after 3 months in Czechoslovakia.

Orange juice

One day a rumour spread amongst the foreigners that there was orange juice at Plus. We all scrambled down there and bought 2 or 3 litres each, no more because it was expensive and we didn’t expect it to disappear as mysteriously as it had arrived. But disappear it did, within a matter of days. It didn’t come back again for 6 weeks and then when it did, one of my American colleagues decided not to take chances and purchased 2 cases of it.

Meanwhile, back in The America…

I was in LA in the summer of 1993. I went into a Ralph’s grocery store there and nearly had a meltdown. I counted how many different kinds of orange juice there were, and I still remember: 19. That was counting only the half-gallon cartons of ready-to-drink pure orange juice – not counting the orange-banana or orange-pineapple juices or the frozen concentrates. The score: Ústí nad Labem 1 (only recently and only sometimes), Los Angeles 19.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The actual tears came when my mom sent me into the toothpaste aisle to get myself some good American toothpaste to take back with me. I broke down because I couldn’t remember how to make a decision when faced with so many choices, all of them in fact the same. I didn’t even bother counting the toothpastes.

Salad

I used to go to Germany to get salads with real lettuce in them. Dresden is only about 70 km from Ústí by train, maybe closer by car, and we could go there for dinner. You could get salads with iceberg lettuce at both McDonald’s and Burger King.

Broccoli

I first saw broccoli in Ústí nad Labem in spring of 1994. I remember exactly where and I remember being so surprised that I didn’t even buy it.

Prague 2006

You can get anything and relative prices have come down. Today, for example, I bought organic green tea, whole grain pasta, soy milk, tahini and products that actually have “suitable for vegetarians” printed on the packaging. You can get all kinds of fruits and vegetables all the time – mangoes, melons, avocados, asparagus… There is way more fish than there used to be; the finer restaurants get their fish flown in fresh every day. I don’t even eat iceberg lettuce anymore because you can get every kind of leaf possible from romaine and lollo rosso to endive, frisée and rocket.

There are restaurants for nearly every kind of cuisine in Prague: French, Mexican, Thai, Pakistani, fusion, whatever.

The only thing that reminds me of how things used to be is that occasionally a herb or spice will disappear from every shop in town at the same time. I have been looking for tarragon for months and have not been able to find it anywhere.

I now deal with the issue of toothpaste choice by always buying the same brand.

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