avelloso.com

Quinta-feira, Dezembro 13, 2001

Tirania multicultural
Paul Craig Roberts, sobre os efeitos das leis "anti-racismo" (a rigor, leis anti-liberdade de expressão) da União Européia:
"Dilution of national cultures by immigration is the basis for the European Union. A weakened sense of nationhood in Britain, France and Germany means no effective opposition to bureaucratic rule by the European Commission in Brussels.
"In order to criminalize national patriotism and opposition to immigration, the European Union is pushing forward legislation that makes xenophobia and racism crimes. Once this legislation passes, a European who, for example, criticizes immigration as an anti-diversity measure that is wiping European civilization off the face of the earth, can be found guilty of racism and sentenced to two years in prison.
"Similarly, persons who oppose EU measures as contrary to British values or French culture can be imprisoned for xenophobia.
"Hand-in-hand with the criminalization of national identity goes the European arrest warrant. Once in effect, an Englishman could be extradited to Greece and put on trial for offenses that are not crimes in England.
"No finer recipe for oppression could be devised. The oppression will be felt most keenly by the British, for it is the liberties protected by their unique legal system that will be lost. Oppression leads to civil war, not European unity."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 1:05 PM

Who’s a Traitor?
Diante da chocante notícia de que da descoberta de uma rede de espiões israelenses nos EUA que prossivelmente sabiam dos atentados de 11/09, vale notar as observações de Taki sobre Jonathan Pollard, o espião israelense que o "Amen corner" de Israel em Washington até hoje deseja ver solto (ele é o Mumia Abu Jamal dos neoconservadores) e sobre a conduta desse "aliado" americano:
"Just as there should be no leniency whatsoever for Jonathan Pollard, the American who spied for Israel, and who sold Uncle Sam’s attack plan against the USSR to the Israelis who in turn traded the Pollard data for Soviet emigres. (Some ally.) Pollard has to rot in jail, much more so than Walker. Pollard tried to claim double loyalty, to America and Israel, as cynical a defense as I can think of.
"William Joyce, Robert Brasillach and countless others were executed for treason where there was no treason. How does one commit treason against one’s enemy? How does one commit treason by collaborating with one’s own government? But one does commit treason by taking up arms against one’s country, and one does commit treason by selling national secrets to a foreign power. Israel has an unsavory history of spying on Uncle Sam. Those in the Knesset who are demanding freedom for Pollard should be reminded daily by the American government of Israel’s actions during the Six-Day War against the American spy ship Liberty. Israeli planes sank it, killing and wounding hundreds of American sailors. [John] Walker and Pollard should share a cell for the rest of their miserable lives."
Na matéria da Fox, há as seguintes citações sobre a extensão da espionagem israelense:
'A general accounting office investigation referred to Israel as country A and said, "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."
'A defense intelligence report said Israel has a voracious appetite for information and said, "the Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every possible facet of their political and economical policies. It aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target."'
E ainda a seguinte declaração do repórter, depois de uma pergunta do âncora Brit Hume:
'HUME: Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?
'[CARL] CAMERON: It's very explosive information, obviously, and there's a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected — none of it necessarily conclusive. It's more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could they not have know? Almost a direct quote.
'HUME: Going into the fact that they were spying on some Arabs, right?
'CAMERON: Correct.'
postado por Alvaro Velloso 12:59 PM

Junk mail
Normalmente detesto essas mensagens idiotas que vão sendo repassadas pelo e-mail, mas essa, justamente por tratar das mensagens detestáveis, é excelente:
>Retrospectiva 2001 : Como a internet modificou a minha vida!
>Estive fazendo um levantamento de todas as baboseiras que me enviaram pela Internet e observei como elas mudaram a minha vida: Primeiro deixei de ir a bares e boates com medo de me envolver com alguem ligado a alguma quadrilha de ladrões de órgãos e que me roubem as córneas, me arranquem os dois rins ou até mesmo esperma deixando-me estirado dentro de uma banheira cheia de gelo com uma mensagem: "Chame a emergência ou morrerá".
>Assim deixei também de ir ao cinema com medo de sentar-me em uma poltrona com seringa infectada com o vírus da AIDS. Depois parei de atender ao telefone para evitar que me pedissem para digitar *9 e minha linha ser clonada e eu ter de pagar uma conta telefônica astronômica.
>Acabei dando o meu celular porque iriam me presentear com um modelo mais novo da Ericson que nunca chegou. Então tive de comprar outro mas abandonei-o em um canto com medo que as microondas me dessem câncer no cérebro.
>Deixei de comer vários alimentos com medo dos estrógenos. Parei de comer galinha e hambúrgueres porque eles não são mais que carne de monstros horríveis sem olhos, cabeludos e cultivados em um laboratório. Deixei de ter relações sexuais por medo de comprar preservativos furados que me contagiem com alguma doença venérea
Aproveitei e abandonei o hábito de tomar qualquer coisa em lata para não morrer pela urina de rato.
>Deixei de ir aos shoppings com medo que seqüestrem a minha mulher e a obriguem a gastar todos os limites do cartão de crédito ou coloquem alguém morto no porta malas do automóvel dela. Eu também doei todas minhas poupanças à conta de Brian, um menino doente que estava a ponto de morrer umas 700 vezes no hospital. Eu participei arduamente em uma campanha contra a tortura de alguns ursos asiáticos que tinham a bílis extraída, e contra o desmatamento da floresta amazônica. [Poderia ter acrescentado um protesto inspirado pela nova fraude que infesta as caixas de mensagem: a mensagem com uma "reprodução" do livro didático americano que traz um mapa com a floresta amazônica citada como "zona internacional".]
>Fiquei praticamente arruinado financeiramente por comprar todos os antivírus existentes para evitar que a maldita rã da Budweiser invadisse o meu micro ou que os teletubies se apoderassem do meu protetor de tela. Deixei de fazer, tomar e comer tantas coisas que quase morro desnutrido.

>Cansei de esperar junto a minha caixa de correio os US$ 150.000 que a Microsoft e a AOL me mandariam na participação de rastreio de e-mails enviados. Nem tampouco chegou o telefone Ericson muito menos a passagem para a Disneylândia.
>Quis fazer o meu testamento e entrega-lo ao meu advogado para doar os meus bens para a instituição beneficente que recebe um centavo de dólar por cada pessoa que anota seu nome na corrente pela luta da independência das mulheres no Paquistão, mas não pude entregar porque tive medo de passar a língua sobre a cola na borda do envelope e me contaminar com as baratas incubadas nela, segundo me haviam me informado por e-mail. Também não ganhei um milhão de dólares, um porshe e nem fiz sexo com a Nicole Kidmann, que foram as três coisas que pedi como desejo quando recebi e encaminhei o Tantra Mágico enviado pelo Dalai Lama lá da Índia.
>E como se não bastasse acabei acreditando que tudo de ruim e de injusto que me aconteceu é porque quebrei todas as correntes ridículas que me enviaram e acabei sendo amaldiçoado. Resultado: estou em tratamento psiquiátrico.
>NOTA IMPORTANTE: Se você não enviar esta mensagem a pelo menos 10 pessoas, nada irá te acontecer. No entanto as mentiras e baboseiras continuarão infernizando a sua vida em 2002 por falta de informação e esclarecimento. Não se deixe influenciar por elas. Delete-as. Se até as baleias podem ser salvas por que não a Internet? Em 2002, Salvemo-nos...
Hear, hear.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 12:51 PM

Segunda-feira, Dezembro 10, 2001

1975 East Timor Invasion Got U.S. Go-Ahead
Então você acha - como eu costumava achar - que essa história de que o Henry Kissinger é um criminoso de guerra, responsável por grandes atrocidades, é mera bobagem esquerdista? Que, na pior das hipóteses, ele seria indiretamente responsável por atrocidades, e que isso certamente bastaria para fazer dele um homem mau, mas não um criminoso horrível?
Pois olhe a questão com mais atenção: o fato de, no caso do massacre de cristãos em Timor Leste, Kissinger ter afirmado que "não objetaria" à invasão pretendida pelo presidente da Indonésia, Suharto, parece mesmo reforçar a tese da responsabilidade indireta. Mas é preciso acrescentar que, na época, quem fornecia as armas à Indonésia eram os EUA e que Kissinger se ofereceu para oferecer justificativas à ação de Suharto ("auto-defesa"!) - o que significa que Kissinger não apenas aprovou a ação de Suharto, como lhe deu os meios para que ele pudesse realizá-la e arrumou argumentos para legitimá-la aos olhos da comunidade internacional. Para mim, isso faz dele co-autor de um genocídio. E o fato de ele ter repetidamente mentido a respeito mostra que ele tem consciência disso.
"President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger gave Indonesian President Suharto the go-ahead for Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor that left at least 200,000 dead, newly declassified documents show.
"It has long been suspected that Ford and Kissinger approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony. They met with Suharto in Jakarta on Dec. 6, 1975, the day before he sent Indonesian forces into East Timor.
"This has been denied by Kissinger, who has maintained that he learned of the plan at the airport only as he was preparing to leave the country. (...)
"In a secret State Department telegram, Ford and Kissinger assured Suharto that they would not object to what the Indonesian leader termed 'rapid or drastic action' in East Timor.
"'We will understand and will not press you on the issue,' Ford said, according to the telegram, which was declassified in June and posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 'We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.'
"The private research group said it obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act.
"Kissinger told Suharto: 'It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.' He also urged Suharto to wait until he and Ford returned to the United States. 'The president will be back on Monday at 2:00 PM Jakarta time,' he said. 'We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned.'
"Kissinger also suggested that the United States could construe Indonesia's operation as 'self defense' rather than a 'foreign operation.' At the time of the invasion, the United States supplied the bulk of Indonesia's weapons on the condition that they be used only for defense or internal security.
"Asked in 1995 about the U.S. role before the invasion, Kissinger replied: 'Timor was never discussed with us when we were in Indonesia. At the airport as we were leaving, the Indonesians told us that they were going to occupy the Portuguese colony of Timor. To us that did not seem like a very significant event, because the Indians had occupied the Portuguese colony of Goa 10 years earlier, and to us it looked like another process of decolonization.'"
postado por Alvaro Velloso 9:59 PM

Fresh air in the hothouse
A era vitoriana foi uma era de puritanismo e imposição estatal da "virtude"? De maneira nenhuma, diz o livro "Inventing the victorians", de Matthew Sweet - essa foi só a imagem inventada por Virgina Woolf e seus asseclas.
Segundo a resenha de Jane Ridley, Sweet mostra que não havia grandes diferenças entre a época vitoriana e a nossa em termos de sexo e que, em outras questões, como as drogas, eles eram até menos puritanos:
"Matthew Sweet has sleuthed the film studio in Hove (now a kitchen showroom) where the first blue movie was shot in 1897. But the cinema brought censorship, not liberation. No one checked novels for obscenity in the way that the British Board of Film Censors (founded in 1912) scanned films. The Victorians were lax on drugs too. Opium was everywhere — it was opium, not religion, that was the opium of the people. In the Fens the farming community lived in a permanent state of narcotic dilation. People worried about the unhealthy effects of green tea while doping themselves freely with laudanum and cocaine.
"Dickens’s story The Mystery of Edwin Drood implied an East End packed with opium dens, but in fact there was only one London street like this — Shadwell Court. Victorians didn’t need to smoke opium in a squalid den when it could be bought cheaply over the counter at the chemist’s. The cute TV image of a London criminal underworld of swirling fogs and flickering gas lamps is a 20th-century invention. Victorian murders were uncannily similar to our own."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 9:47 PM

Police want to supply free heroin
A única solução para combater o tráfico de drogas é legalizá-las, diz... um deputado do PV? um apologista das drogas? Não. Diz a polícia da Inglaterra.
Infelizmente, a idéia, embora já seja um avanço, vem embalada num projeto socialista de distribuição estatal de heroína - e mais uma vez o Estado estará fazendo aquilo que proíbe os outros de fazer:
"POLICE Chiefs are proposing the effective de-criminalisation of heroin, with plans to supply it free to eliminate dealers and associated crime.
"Sir David Phillips, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, will unveil proposals next month for the most radical change to drugs policy so far. He will call for heroin to be prescribed to anyone who wants it in an attempt to destroy the illegal trade and the £1 billion cost of crime committed by addicts.
"The drug will be dispensed - probably as a tablet or linctus - in official premises staffed by police, social workers and medical personnel. It will still be a crime to use or possess heroin elsewhere.
(...)
"Sir David, the chief constable of Kent, said: 'The system has failed. We have an out-of-control drugs industry and it is time to try a new approach.'
"A senior officer said: 'If we provide free heroin to anyone who wants it, then at a stroke we eliminate a multi-billion-pound criminal conspiracy. No one would buy heroin if they can get it free.'
(...)
"Prescribing heroin was standard practice from the 1920s to 1960s and was credited with keeping addict numbers down. In 1971, there were 500 addicts. Now there are an estimated 500,000. Since 1971, medical opinion has favoured weaning addicts off their dependency by using methadone.
"There had been previous experiments in prescribing heroin. In 1989, a system offering chronic addicts pharmaceutical heroin on the NHS began in the North. The so-called Widnes experiment, under Dr John Marks, a psychiatrist, ran for five years.
"The clinic claimed there were no drug-related deaths or HIV infection, and a significant improvement in health among the group of addicts. Police in north Cheshire reported a 93-per-cent reduction in drug-related crime among the addicts but in 1994, the experiment's funding was stopped."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 9:41 PM

Terror hit list drawn up by US
Apesar de ainda não haver nenhuma decisão a respeito do Iraque, já há fortes sinais de que o projeto dos falcões de fazer uma "limpeza geral" nos "rogue countries" está prestes a ser posto em prática - começando pela Somália, essa poderosíssima força geopolítica (que, no entanto, não tem governo central - o que é certamente inaceitável! Imaginem a arrogância desse povo em rejeitar o socialismo! O império americano precisa consertar isso JÁ!).
"US intelligence officials appear to have drawn up a detailed target list of terror bases across the globe. They are urgently assessing the risks posed by facilities in the Aceh region of Indonesia (a secessionist part of Sumatra), the Hadramawt region of Yemen, and Ras Komboni in southern Somalia, near the Kenyan border. The sites have been identified from documents and confessions from captured fighters.
"According to a report in the Los Angeles Times which details the possible targets, Somalia, where central government hardly exists, is causing increasing concern in Washington. Walter Kansteiner, the secretary of state for African affairs, claimed on Friday that people with ties to Osama bin Laden were involved in the transitional regime trying to take power in Mogadishu.
"Somali officials admit there was a base at Ras Komboni, but they and aid agency workers say it has long been abandoned. The newspaper also says US special forces have launched discreet raids against al-Qaida cells in Bosnia-Herzegovina and taken more than a dozen suspects prisoner.
"Another area of worry is the Philippines, where the US is willing to help rescue two American missionaries who were kidnapped by Islamic separatists in May, a presidential spokesman said yesterday. (...)
"Domestic pressure on the White House remains centred on attacking Iraq, and Mr Cheney did little to cool public ardour."
Ah, sim: essa matéria do Guardian não fala nisso, mas uma matéria no Observer nota que entre os novos alvos dos bravos justiceiros americanos está Foz do Iguaçu, na fronteira entre Brasil, Paraguai e Argentina - parece que tem gente da al-Qaida ali também:
"The CIA and military intelligence is also sending missions into Paraguay and Uruguay to combat what it believes are active al-Qaeda cells. Some of these are concentrated, say officials, at the point where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet near the Foz do Iguaçu waterfall."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 9:34 PM

Fear of queuing
Mark Steyn - que está longe de ser um crítico da guerra ou do governo Bush - sobre os únicos efeitos das absurdas medidas de "segurança" implantadas nos aeroportos americanos:
"In the wake of 11 September, the FAA has vastly increased the opportunities for commercial aviation to chastise its customers. The federal government has now ordered the airlines to restrict cabin baggage to two items — one carry-on bag and one personal item. There’s no official government definition of ‘personal item’, but the Air Transport Association has decided that, if your bag contains essentials — wallet, medication, pen and notebook — it counts as a personal item, but if it’s got non-essentials, such as lipstick, cufflinks and a handful of CDs you bought at Tower Records earlier that morning, it should be redesignated as carry-on. The point of this is to reduce the number of bags going through the screening machines, and thus increase the chance of the security guards spotting dangerous weapons like eyebrow pencils. On the other hand, it increases the number of bags that are checked in, and thus decreases even further the likelihood of anybody spotting anything dodgy going into the hold. And, either way, it overlooks the various reasons passengers take as much as they can into the cabin: for one thing, the compensation you get for items that are lost, damaged or stolen en route is a mere pittance; for another, if you’re flying to New York for, say, a black-tie dinner that evening, you’re taking a huge risk checking in your tux (as I know from experience). After 11 September, some flight attendants said they wouldn’t feel safe until the government banned all hand luggage. Fine, but if you round up all the biz execs in America willing to check in their laptops and attaché cases, you’ll have enough to fill a couple of four-seater Piper Cubs.
"Pre-9/11, the non-security procedures at American airports were doubly harmful: they deluded the average citizen into believing that the state was ensuring his safety, while letting the professional terrorist know he can get away with anything. Norm Mineta’s strategy for the world post-9/11 is for more of the same: if you buy a plastic fireman’s axe at Toys R Us for your favourite nephew, it will be confiscated as a dangerous weapon; if you’re sitting at the gate reading a thriller with a cover showing an explosion, you will be prevented from boarding as a security risk, as happened to one young man recently; if you stand up on a flight within 30 minutes of Reagan National, your plane will be diverted to Dulles, as happened a couple of hours before Monday’s big crash because a guy needed to use the bathroom. On the other hand, a fellow at New Orleans forgot he had a handgun in his briefcase and it sailed through the scanner undetected. On the plane, he suddenly remembered it and gave it to the stewardess, who promptly ensured that the poor law-abiding citizen was detained on arrival and harassed by law enforcement for what was, in fact, the airline’s incompetence.
"Now the Senate and the House of Representatives are split over whom to entrust with airport security: the House favours private firms (as at Heathrow and Tel Aviv), the Senate wants them federalised, so that instead of being minimum-wage incompetents who quit after four months, they’ll be highly-paid incompetents you can never sack."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 9:23 PM