The Place of Dead Roads

From the lips of Berlusconi:

"I have been accused many times of saying communists eat babies. Go and read the black book on communism and you'll find that under Mao's China they didn't eat babies but they boiled them to fertilise the fields.

"I can organise a conference in which I will prove communists have really eaten babies and done even worse things." - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Michele, is it true they taste like chicken?

From Reuters, Court upholds "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" student banner:

An Alaska high school violated a student's free speech rights by suspending him after he unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across the street from the school, a federal court ruled on Friday.

Joseph Frederick, a student at Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska, displayed the banner -- which refers to smoking marijuana -- in January 2002 to try to get on television as the Olympic torch relay was passing the school.

Principal Deborah Morse seized the banner and suspended the 18-year-old for 10 days, saying he had undermined the school's educational mission and anti-drug stance.

Friday's ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a decision by a federal court in Alaska that backed Frederick's suspension and said his rights were not violated.

The appeals court said the banner was protected speech because it did not disrupt school activity and was displayed off school grounds during a non-curricular activity.

"Public schools are instrumentalities of government, and government is not entitled to suppress speech that undermines whatever missions it defines for itself," Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote in the court's opinion.

The court also cleared the way for Frederick to seek damages, saying Morse was aware of relevant case law and should have known her actions violated his rights.

We have a new type of rule now.
Not one man rule or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy,
But of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power
By random pressures and subject to political and economic factors
That leave little room for decision.
They're representatives of abstract forces
Who've reached power through surrender of self.
The Iron-Will Dictator is a thing of the past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.
The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds
Are rulers by accident,
Inept, frightened pilots at the controls
Of a vast machine they cannot understand,
Calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

William S. Burroughs

In a follow-up to this post, The Sun Online is reporting

SEXY teen star Lindsay Lohan thrilled fans at an LA fashion show when one of her boobs popped out of her dress.

After her dramatic weight loss last year, the actress famously said she "wanted her boobs back".

Seems alot of other people would like that too.

From NBC, United Arab Emirates: Friend or foe?

Can a Dubai company be trusted to run American ports?
By Andrea Mitchell

...Another problem is rampant smuggling through Dubai’s port. A criminal complaint, obtained by NBC News, says the U.A.E.’s director of customs “would not allow” a U.S. special agent to detain a shipment of nuclear equipment heading to Pakistan in 2003 and is still permitting nuclear equipment to get to Iran.

“Unless Dubai is willing to impose restrictions on what Iran can buy, there’s no hope of stopping the Iranian bomb program,” says Gary Milhollin, the director of the University of Wisconsin’s Project on Nuclear Arms Control...

Please note the tense of the verbs here. The UAE is currently helping the Iranian government get nuclear supplies. Since the Bush adminstration is making so much noise about Iran's nuclear ambitions, why do they want to help the Dubai government? I would have thought Bush would have taken his own words to heart when he said

"Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror."

Reading this quote and knowing the UAE is at worst helping, or at least doing nothing, to help Iran get nuclear equipment, I would have thought there would be calls for a naval blockade between the UAE and Iran. Not the desire to help the UAE's DP World become more important the shipping business.

But I guess if they did this, then it would become harder and harder for the current US adminstration to make the case for going to war with Iran.

LithiumCola has a diary discussing this AP article:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Feb. 28) - Sunnis and Shiites traded bombings and mortar fire against mainly religious targets in Baghdad, killing at least 68 people a day after authorities lifted a curfew that had briefly calmed a series of sectarian reprisal attacks.

The surge of violence deepened the trauma of residents already shaken by fears the country was teetering on the brink of sectarian civil war [and] threatened talks among Iraqi politicians struggling to form a government..

To which I pointed out this was indeed wrong. According to our President:

President George W. Bush...denied on Tuesday Iraq was sliding into civil war, despite the worst sectarian strife since a U.S.-led invasion. Asked what Washington would do if civil war broke out in Iraq, Bush told ABC News: "I don't buy your premise that there's going to be a civil war."
- Reuters

Yea, keep saying that and it will come true. Really. Maybe George isn't saying it hard enough. Ok, now everyone join in and we can make it happen.

Oh fuck it. We and the middle east and the whole mess are screwed.

"If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country ... this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world," National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment Tuesday. A civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region's rival Islamic sects against each other...
AP

From United Nuclear Scientific Equipment & Supplies (Supplying the science hobbyist, industry, government, schools & universities since 1998.)

The United States CPSC has initiated criminal legal action against us and other chemical suppliers.
In short, the CPSC would like to ban the public from all access to chemicals. This would mean an end to hobbies such as model rocketry, pyrotechnics and of course chemistry. One by one, our freedoms are slowly being taken away from us - this action must be stopped now.
Specifically, the CPSC is focusing on certain chemicals and metals at this time. The current CPSC injunction would require: