©www.arna.info

Ashraf Abu-elhaje, an actor (1996) in the theatre of Jenin refugee-camp. Ashraf leads a large group of fighters in the battle of Jenin 2002. Ashraf was killed by a rocket fired from a helicopter.

Last night I sat through the screening of a documentary called "Arna's Children". Arna was a Jewish woman, who moved to Jenin refugee camp in Palestine and there created a center for children. The screening was organized by the 'Palestine Solidarity Campaign' to mark the 60th Anniversary of Al-Nakba - the Palestinians "day of Catastrophe" when the state of Israel was illegally established on their land. The film is the work of Juliano Mer-Khamis, Arna's son and an actor. Through the creative arts and games, Arna tried to help the Palestinian children of the camp express their feelings of anger, frustration and helplessness as they see their houses demolished by Israeli tanks, their people murdered by Israeli soldiers.

Juliano created a theatre group as part of Arna's center for children which helped give a voice and meaning to the lives of Palestine's children. It also allowed them to dream of a better future. But living in Jenin camp, under the occupation and brutal oppression by the IDF, we follow their lives to see that they did not become actors, painters, teachers, doctors, whatever it was they dreamed of. Many grew up to become resistance fighters, two of them killed by the Israeli army during fights, one during a "suicide attack".

©Rodney Matthews

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings." (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll, 1872, jabberwocky)

In the last installment of my series about comets and asteroids, I quoted John Lewis of the University of Arizona who said:

Astronomy books and papers far too numerous to cite offer the assurance that "no one has ever been killed by a meteorite."

We now know, from that article, that this is very far from the truth. We also know that we do stand in some peril at the present time and that our governments seem to be concealing that fact, lying to us, distracting us, and generally making sure that the resources that they collect from the masses are not used on behalf of those masses, but rather to enrich and ensure the survival of that small minority of pathological individuals at the top; in short, we're all being royally screwed.

In that last article, I also quoted some excerpts from a couple of news items that expose the fact that science is controlled and manipulated by politics. It has, apparently, become something of a scandal during the Bush Administration. Scientific reports have been censored, suppressed and falsified particularly in regards to health and environmental research. Anthony Robbins, professor of medicine at Tufts University and former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, came right out and said that the White House itself has been directly involved in the suppression and falsification of science. Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics at Cornell University and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists informs us that "the public and Congress have often been deprived of accurate and candid scientific information." (Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics)

Well, it looks like something fishy is going on with a topic that has been in the news for quite awhile now: deaths due to Tasers.

We begin our little story with an article from NorthCountryGazette.org:

Pinellas County Taser Deaths - Excusable Or Not?

June Maxam
North Country Gazette
7 May 2008

Between June 2001 and June 2007, there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers. Of these cases, in seven cases, medical examiners said tasers were a cause or a contributing factor or could not be ruled out as a cause of death.

In 16 cases, coroners and other officials stated that a taser was a secondary or contributory factor of death.

In dozens of cases, coroners cited excited delirium as cause of death. Excited delirium has been questioned as a medical diagnosis.

Several deaths occurred as a result of injuries sustained in struggles. In a few of these cases, head injury due to falling after being shocked contributed to later death.

In 2005, a medical examiner ruled for the first time that a taser was the primary factor in a death. [...]

Fabulous. If you put the headline together with the text, it sounds like Pinellas County, FL is a veritable hotbed for Taser Deaths. So what's the big deal? The day after we posted this article under our Fair Use Policy, we received an e-mail as follows:

Let's try an experiment. Think of opinions you may have formed, beliefs that may have arisen due to one or a group of photographs that were distributed in the media. When you saw those images, did you feel anger, bitterness, or even hate? Were you elated, joyous, or perhaps confused? Were you compelled to somehow change the way you perceived the world based on the emotions that were triggered by an image?

Now imagine for a moment that a certain number of photographs in the media - let's say half, for the sake of this experiment - are forgeries. Would you be compelled to re-evaluate that position if you had learned said photograph was false?

"Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb." -- Shlomo Brom, Israel's deputy national security adviser under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak

As Israeli politicians continue to beat the war-drums over what they (now alone) claim to be an imminent threat from a nuclear-capable Iran, very similar hysterical rhetoric is being used in the attempt to convince us of a very different if equally catastrophic threat to life on earth - "climate change". The doomsayers tell us we have ten years, at most, to reverse the inevitable destruction or face the dire consequences of cities under water, earthquakes, tsunamis and the dreaded, if not racist, tropical diseases moving north. While researching this article I came across a blog that made a very salient point:

Quite apart from the science, one thing I find suspicious about climate catastrophism is how there's supposed to be this massive and terribly deleterious change ahead of us, and yet (by what strikes me as an amazing coincidence) we are always said to still be capable of stopping it but only -- and here the speaker invariably assumes the urgent air of an infomercial voice-over -- if we act right this very minute. This is strange, given that we're dealing with what (on the catastrophist account) seems to be a slippery-slope doomsday scenario that has been building up since the Industrial Revolution. Given the long time-frame and massive uncertainties involved, you'd think that predictions of the exact timing of the "point of no return" must involve a fairly significant margin of error. In light of that, it's odd that there doesn't seem to be even one climate-change affirmer out there who's saying "Rats! I hate to tell you this guys, but it's one or two (or ten or fifty) years too late and there's basically nothing we can do now." Perhaps adding: "So we might as well just go out in style -- let's everyone head out to the SUV dealership!" Or "Let's get 10,000 of our best friends together and jet over to Bali for a big wingding!"

On the other hand, there are thousands of them who seem to think we're just a few years away from this point of no return...

And that's it: We're always a few years away from the point of no return, whether it's Iran, climate, or some other "catastrophic" event we must act now before it is too late. What if Iran already has the bomb? What if we're already past the point of no return? What will you do, what will They do then?

©Unknown

French psychiatrist Serge Hefez has written a book about the ever-present character of the French president in the minds of the French, La Sarkose obsessionnelle.

The following is a translation of a description that appeared on the French news site rue89:

After a year of familiarization, how to stop being Sarkointoxicated?

by HUBERT ARTUS | Rue89 | 06/05/2008

[...] Smoking Narcissism is bad for your health

"When I think of him, I feel overwhelmed by an obscene substance of which I am unable to rid myself."

How many Muslim lives can you get for a "golden nugget"?

Back in 2003, after the start of the Iraq invasion, then chairman of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and current head of British overseas intelligence agency MI6, requested that "ten golden nuggets" be included in the US-backed Iraq Survey Group's report on WMD's in Iraq.

©Worldofrockhounds

"Golden nuggets", as it turned out, was Mr. Scarlett's euphemistic term for "lies" and included several deliciously bogus claims:

Here's a bad joke for you: What did French president Nicolas Sarkozy say to Carla Bruni the first night they met?

Give up?

"Voulez-vous karcher avec moi ce soir?"

(Karcher is a manufacturer of power washers.)

And really, can you blame him? I mean, let's face it: there are people in this world who love to take advantage of others. These parasites use everyone around them for their own personal gain and glory. They feed off of the hard work of normal people like you and me. They don't believe in a hard day's work; they believe in hardly working. They lie, cheat, steal, and then more or less complain about how unfairly they're being treated by using the most mangled logic to justify their actions. Quite often, even when caught in a lie, they just keep on lying.

That's the kind of scum we're dealing with here.

So, I agree wholeheartedly with the good Sarkonator: break out the powerwashers!

It has been a month now since the Signs editors engaged in a little exercise of connecting the dots: we noticed a number of high level meetings of some of the most prominent Axis of Evil personalities, and thinking it likely that there is an important reason for the activity, we published our observations here.

We have decided to make this a periodical effort of 'joining the dots', hoping to make sense of the avalanche of information that comes our way on a daily basis. It may help us to detect trends, and to understand which way the drivers are steering this bus called Planet Earth.

Well, judging by the events of April, it seems that they are taking us towards a cliff, and it is rapidly approaching.

©Tooz

So, we've seen Obama being put on the ropes by Hillary over the question of Israel. The two are involved in a spitting match to see who can support Israel in the most rabid and mindless manner.

It seems some influential supporters of Israel had a little get-together back in March to challenge representatives from the three presidential candidates who have Israel's backing to make the most outrageously pro-Israel statements imaginable.