Dude, I Could, Like, So Go For Some Baklava Right Now…..

The crack journalism of Reuters… Dude. "Here, take a few pounds home to the wife".

Burma Road

I have not commented about the situation in Burma - or Myanmar - since it started. I'm not all that up on the situation there. But Buddhist monks have been marching in greater and greater numbers there against the military junta that has ruled there for many years now. With China's help, by the way. For a more local perspective, Agam, over at Agam's Gecko is following events in Burma. And it looks fairly bleak at the moment.

This is the only clear photo I could find of the appearance of Daw Suu on Saturday. The marchers made an effort to go to her house again Sunday, but they were turned back by an increased security force which kept the street blocked. Since the first protests began last month with very small, but very courageous actions by freedom activists, about 200 of these activists have been taken into custody. Others are now in hiding, including a young woman named Nilar Thein. Her story provides a taste of the reality in this Orwellian state.

She has been hiding for a month now - moving every couple of days to a new house - hunted by a huge force of security officials, plain-clothed policemen, informers and hired thugs.

Nilar and her husband Jimmy have a five year old daughter, Nay Kyi, or Sunshine. Jimmy has already been apprehended, and like the others taken up in the sweep, no one knows where he is.The Red Cross hasn't been allowed to see the junta's prisoners for years. They are but two of Burma's "8888 Generation," so named for the student-led movement that began on August 8, 1988. It was crushed with an estimated 3000 citizens slain by their own government.

Nilar took the child with her at first. But Sunshine's cries were in danger of giving them both away. Now Jimmy's elderly mother is looking after her.

One night recently, Nilar sneaked back close enough to hear her baby crying through an open window.

"They are using her as bait," she said. "I should be breast feeding her. But I cannot give in."

Aung San Suu Kyi's fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama is no stranger to the extreme repression of totalitarian regimes. Tibetan monks and nuns have been at the forefront of the Tibetan freedom movement for more than half a century. It is only since the Burmese monks and nuns have taken up freedom's torch, passed from the hands of those like Nilar Thein who have kept the dream alive, that what seemed hopeless just a few weeks ago has begun to gain serious momentum.

Agam also notes that the junta has announced a crackdown. They are banning gatherings of more than five people and have imposed a curfew.

The "international community," functioning as the United Nations, turned its back on Tibet in 1950 — one of the most pathetically shameful episodes in the organisation's history. World leaders are gathering in New York today for the opening of its new session. Have they learned anything in the past 57 years? "Deep concern" just isn't going to cut it.

Agam has a lot more.

A Mugging In Malaysia

A French woman touring a nature preserve in Malaysia got a bit more than she bargained for. She was mugged. The thief took her bag, her shoes, her socks and her pants. So, what, you say? Happens all the time. Well, no, not really.

Because the mugger was an orangutan.

The tourist, who asked to be identified only as Odile, was taking photographs Sunday of Delima — a female orangutan roaming free in Malaysia's Semenggoh Wildlife Center on Borneo island — when the animal grabbed at her backpack, said Wilfred Landong, chief park warden of Malaysia's Sarawak state.

They tussled over the bag and Delima ripped Odile's pants, Landong said.

"She had scratches and bruise marks on her knees and thighs," he said, adding that park rangers gave her medical treatment.

Odile said she had not tried to touch or otherwise harass the animal, saying she was only been trying to take its photo.

She said in an e-mail to the Associated Press that she'd let Delima have her bag after the orangutan grabbed it and then apparently searched it for something to eat, but found nothing.

She referred to Delima as "he."

"He took my shoes and socks off, and then tried to take off my trousers," Odile wrote. "As he couldn't with his hands only, he tried with his teeth and that's when I got bitten. As soon as he got my trousers he went away."

Authorities are now looking for a well-dressed orangutan. However, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard have ascertained that the search is futile. The orangutan used the woman's credit cards and booked a flight to Tennessee. We believe she may be going there to confront Al Gore about the genocide of orangutans his global warming hysterics are promoting.

We can but hope.

Yeah, But Was It Smoked?

So, a guy goes to an auction at one of those self-storage places. You know, where if you don't pay the rent, they sell your stuff. He gets a good deal on a smoker, takes it home and finds out there's a bonus inside.

A human leg, from foot to above the knee. And it's original owner wants it back.

The smoker had been sold at an auction of items left behind at a storage facility, so investigators contacted the mother and son who had rented the space where the smoker was found.

The mother explained her son had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg following the surgery. The mother said her son plans to drive to Maiden, about 35 miles northwest of Charlotte, to reclaim his amputated leg, police said.

Um. Inquiring minds want to know if it was smoked. Demented inquiring minds want to know what dry rub was used.

Ahmadinejad Flips UN The Bird

For all intents and purposes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flipped the UN off today with his speech to the General Assembly. So much for Columbia teaching his a lesson, eh?

UNITED NATIONS - Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Tuesday that Iran's disputed nuclear program is closed as a political issue and said Tehran will ignore a U.N. Security Council demand imposed by "arrogant powers" to curb its nuclear program.

Instead, he told world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly that Iran has decided to pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program "through its appropriate legal path," the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.

When Ahmadinejad was ushered to the podium, the U.S. delegation walked out, leaving only a low-ranking note-taker to listen to his speech, which indirectly accused the United States and Israel of major human rights violations. State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said the U.S. wanted "to send him a powerful message."

The Iranian president spoke hours after French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned the assembly that allowing Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons would be an "unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world." In her talk, German Chancellor Angela Merkel threatened tougher sanctions against Iran.

Iran insists the program is purely peaceful, aimed solely at using nuclear reactors to generate electricity. But the United States and key European nations believe the program is a cover for an Iranian attempt to produce nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad has defied two Security Council resolutions demanding Iran suspend enrichment and imposing escalating sanctions on key figures and organizations involved in the nuclear program. He made clear in his speech that Iran did not intend to comply with them now.

"In the last two years, abusing the Security Council, the arrogant powers have repeatedly accused Iran and even made military threats and imposed illegal sanctions against it," he said.

"Previously, they illegally insisted on politicizing the Iranian nation's nuclear case, but today, because of the resistance of the Iranian nation, the issue is back to the agency, and I officially announce that in our opinion the nuclear issue of Iran is now closed and has turned into an ordinary agency matter," Ahmadinejad said.

Iran will now play games exclusively with the toothless UN nuclear lapdog, The International Atomic Enabling Agency or IAEA according to Mad Mahmoud. Gee, that's a real relief for the world, isn't it. Since I have been writing this blog (and actually for quite some time before that) do you know how much progress the UN and the IAEA have made with Tehran?

Not one damned bit. None, nada, zip.

Snakes On A Sailor! Twice!

Royal Navy lieutenant Olly Slight and his partner had the fright of their lives when a three foot snake came to visit. In their bed. That was a couple of months ago. they put it all behind them after the snake was captured and taken to a sanctuary. Until the backup snake arrived, that is.

The couple had managed to corner the first snake after a chase around their rented home in Ilchester, near Yeovil, Somerset. It took refuge in their one-year-old son Jacob’s toy box, and was captured in a pillow case.

The RSPCA identified it as a nonvenomous North American corn snake and found it a new home at a reptile sanctuary in south Somerset.

The couple had all but forgotten their close encounter two months ago until they found the black-and-orange snake’s twin slithering up their stairs.

They were considering finding somewhere else to live, fearing that there might be a nest of the reptiles in the attic. However, they belonged to a neighbour, who said he had lost two of his three pet snakes last year. Both runaways are now at the sanctuary.

Snake shoe thieves are known to work in pairs. Well, at least they're done waiting for the other snake to drop.

Help Out A Blogger

Jim Lynch, who runs bRight and Early is having some real financial difficulties and could sure use some help. If you can stop by and help, he'd appreciate it. If you have a blog, linking to him will also help direct some traffic.

Goat Justice!

The city of Seattle is about to be saved! The city council has approved pygmy goats!

The City Council voted unanimously to reclassify the goats — also known dwarf or miniature goats — as small animals rather than farm animals after testimony touting the virtues of the dog-sized critters as companions, weed eaters and milk producers.

"One small step for man, one giant step for goatkind," council member Richard Conlin, who sponsored the measure, said after Monday's vote.

The little goats — up to 2 feet tall and weighing 50 to 100 pounds — must have pet licenses, just like cats, dogs and potbelly pigs. However, these pets must be dehorned and males must be neutered to reduce musky odors.

They're not allowed outside the owner's yard — but other people can borrow them for grazing.

The measure was suggested to Conlin by Jennie Grant, president of the Goat Justice League, which she says has 100 members.

The Goat Justice League has arrived! Do you realize what this means? Seattle's crime rate is going to drop when the diminutive four-legged crime fighters hit the bricks! Supergoat, Batgoat, Aquagoat, Martian Goathunter and Wonder Ewe will soon be bringing truth, justice and the American way to Seattle!

Extreme Makeover, British Foreign Office Edition

Brand-new British Foreign Secretary David Miliband is concerned that his new department is seen as "stuffy". He is launching a crusade to change that image. First of all, he is going to require ambassadors and diplomats take up blogging. No, really, he is.

He intends to establish his credentials as a modernising Foreign Secretary by insisting that ambassadors and other senior Foreign Office staff take up blogging in order to make Britain's international case more widely read.

The initiative is being dubbed "Our Man in Blogistan," by insiders.

"The days when we communicated mainly by telegram are over," Mr Miliband said. "Communication has to be for the masses now, not just elites. We want to take what we are doing to a much wider audience."

Mr Miliband will launch his own Foreign Office blog tomorrow. He was the first Cabinet minister to take up a regular internet slot as environment secretary and is in the vanguard-of Labour's battle to match the Conservatives for web presence.

Some ambassadors are thought to have expressed reservations about addressing a wider audience.

But one source said that the plans would not be compulsory. "We think there will be good takeup with people keen to tell more people what they do so we don't need to make it a command from on high."

(Wait until they find out how much work blogging actually is!) But wait! There's more. Much, much more. To help kick off the changes he is planning, Miliband is bringing in some expert help with high name recognition! That's right, he'll be launching the newly revamped Foreign Office website with none other than Angelina Jolie!

He is planning to make a joint appearance with Angelina Jolie on a revamped FO website this week - the actress is the goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Afterward, Ms. Jolie will really give the FO a boost by adopting them all. Well, unless her dark side comes out.

And In Today’s News To Make Men Cringe Department…..

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have a bit of advice for men everywhere. It is our considered opinion that is a bad idea to negatively compare your current partner's sexual skills with those of another partner. It becomes a really, really bad idea to do so when lying naked next to the first partner. Especially when she has a kitchen knife at hand.

The man, a 43-year-old Indonesian worker in southern Johor state, was lying in bed with his 48-year-old wife talking about his newly wed second wife, who is in her 30s, when the incident happened, the New Straits Times newspaper reported.

Despite his shock and pain, the man managed to pull on his trousers and ride his motorcycle to a nearby hospital, where doctors had to put in 11 stitches to reattach the organ.

The unidentified woman only gets an 8 on the Bobbitt Scale. Named, of course, after the person who set the benchmark, Lorena Bobbitt. (She was arrested and charged by police.) Commence cringing, guys.

“Somebody Stoled Him”

Those are the words of 5-year-old Zion, a child at the Community Building Children's Center in Spokane, Washington. That was after a pet bunny named Sugar Bunny was stolen last Saturday. Whoever did it left PETA fliers behind.

Sugar Bunny vanished from the Community Building Children's Center on Saturday, teachers said.

"Somebody stoled him," 5-year-old Zion told The Spokesman-Review, which gave only the first names of him and other children in a report on the heist. "I'm sad."

The fliers expressed protests against the Ringling Brothers Circus, which was in town during the weekend, and had a picture of a bear trying to escape from a cage. The fliers bore the names of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Northwest Animal Rights Network.

A PETA spokesperson said that the group does not endorse stealing a pet bunny. Of course, it would be more meaningful if they tried to identify the nasty zealot who thinks stealing children's pets is a valid political statement.

Nepal: No Nudes Need Apply

Nepal is fed up with stupid mountain climber tricks and is clamping down on "disrespectful" nude stunts on Mount Everest.

"People taking their clothes off and so on — these kind of things we are trying to stop," said Ang Tsering Sherpa, the head of Nepal's official mountaineering body which issues climbing permits.

Last year a local climber sparked outrage after he claimed the world's highest display of nudity when he stripped and stood naked for several minutes on the 8,848-metre (29,198-foot) summit……

….."It's disrespectful — the mountains are sacred, they are part of our religion," the Nepal Mountaineering Association president told AFP.

Of course it's also bone stupid. They don't call it "the death zone" for nothing, after all. If someone wants to indulge their exhibitionist tendencies, there are more appropriate places. Go to the Antarctic, they could use a nice sculpture garden.

Ripple Effect

The Detroit Free Press is also not seeing any silver lining in the UAW strike against GM:

Well, this is just what Michigan needed. And the U.S. auto industry. And the ever-shrinking United Auto Workers union.

For the first time in 31 years, the UAW called a national strike Monday, unable to settle a new contract with General Motors Corp. The UAW has 73,000 members working at 82 GM facilities across the country, and the longer they stay out, the further the ripples will spread, to suppliers, retailers and businesses that count UAW members among their customers. The strike may have caught many unprepared, given the widespread belief that because the industry is in such rough shape, this was not going to be the year for a walkout.

"This is horrible, but we're die-hard union, so we have to," one worker at a Wisconsin GM plant told the Associated Press. "We got a mortgage, two car payments and tons of freaking bills."

I'm thinking that this is not going to turn out well for anyone involved. Least of all the workers.

Party Like It’s !970

Daniel Howes from the Detroit News takes a look at the United Auto Workers strike against General Motors. He thinks that the tactics of 1970 are not going to work in 2007.

But it's not 1970, except here in Michigan. GM doesn't dominate its home market; foreign-owned rivals do. The UAW doesn't represent the growing work forces at rivals operating down South — and probably won't anytime soon should this walkout become a recruiting poster for anti-UAW forces from Alabama to Texas.

What happened? For most of the 10 days since the Sept. 14 contract deadline, the signs pointed toward a contract in the most consequential bargaining this industry has seen in two generations. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger signaled the union's desire to avoid a costly walkout, even as GM expressed optimism it would reach a deal to dramatically improve its competitiveness without harming workers.

Not anymore. In one swift act, the UAW jumped from the small artillery of local "bottleneck" strikes to nuclear weapons, sending all 73,000 UAW-GM members out on strike for the first time in 37 years. After this, which began at 11 a.m. Monday, there is nothing left in the union's arsenal.

The union says the strike is over job security. The hard fact of the matter is that General Motors is fighting for survival right now.

In union parlance, this is the "heat-and-light show" writ large — the union turns up the heat until the company sees the light. Except that this company, GM, and its crosstown rivals are less the Big Three of old than they've ever been.

They're bleeding cash. Their market share is declining. Their debt is rated "junk." They're growing overseas where they are unencumbered by 70-plus years of tradition, bargaining history and a crushing, backward culture. They're selling assets so furiously that they look like companies either preparing for a confrontation with labor or in partial liquidation or both.

Most importantly, their competition isn't standing still. The Chinese and the Indians are pushing the Koreans. The Koreans are pushing the Japanese. The Japanese are pushing the Germans, French, Italians and Americans.

How secure will the jobs be if there is no company left?

Poking The Tiger In A Cage

Bret Stephens, writing in the Opinion Journal, is not impressed with Columbia University's invitation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak there. He looks at their justifications and finds them seriously lacking. He imagines what an appearance by Hitler at Columbia would be like, assuming that today's academic standards were in place.

In a March 1952 essay in Commentary magazine on "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth," Trilling observed that "the gist of Orwell's criticism of the liberal intelligentsia was that they refused to understand the conditioned way of life." Orwell, he wrote, really knew what it was like to live under a totalitarian regime–unlike, say, George Bernard Shaw, who had "insisted upon remaining sublimely unaware of the Russian actuality," or H.G. Wells, who had "pooh-poohed the threat of Hitler." By contrast, Orwell "had the simple courage to point out that the pacifists preached their doctrine under condition of the protection of the British navy, and that, against Germany and Russia, Gandhi's passive resistance would have been to no avail."

Trilling took the point a step further, assailing the intelligentsia's habit of treating politics as a "nightmare abstraction" and "pointing to the fearfulness of the nightmare as evidence of their sense of reality." To put this in the context of Mr. Coatsworth's hypothetical, Trilling might have said that in hosting and perhaps debating Hitler, Columbia's faculty and students would not have been "confronting" him, much as they might have gulled themselves into believing they were. Hitler at Columbia would merely have been a man at a podium, offering his "ideas" on this or that, and not the master of a huge terror apparatus bearing down on you. To suggest that such an event amounts to a confrontation, or offers a perspective on reality, is a bit like suggesting that one "confronts" a wild animal by staring at it through its cage at a zoo.

If you were walking about in a jungle, came across a tiger and poked it with a stick, some people might put aside obvious questions about your lack of sense (or sanity) and think you were brave. Past tense, of course, since the praise would likely be posthumous. If you were walking through a zoo, came across that same tiger in a cage and poked it with a stick, you'd be up on felony animal abuse charges - if the crowd at the zoo let you live long enough. Longtime readers might recognize that analogy, I have used it before when discussing the "comedy" routine Stephen Colbert used at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006.

We have already seen how this all is playing out in the world press. Yeah, Bollinger either rope-a-doped Ahmadinejad or ambushed him, depending on your interpretation. Yeah, he spoke truth to power and called Ahamdinejad what he indeed is, a petty tyrant. But the point is that Hitler in 1939 was not much more than a petty tyrant, either. As Stephens puts it after imagining that hypothetical 1939 talk by Adolph at Columbia:

So there is Adolf Hitler on our imagined stage, ranting about the soon-to-be-fulfilled destiny of the Aryan race. And his audience of outstanding Columbia men are mostly appalled, as they should be. But they are also engrossed, and curious, and if it occurs to some of them that the man should be arrested on the spot they don't say it. Nor do they ask, "How will we come to terms with his world?" Instead, they wonder how to make him see "reason," as reasonable people do.

In just a few years, some of these men will be rushing a beach at Normandy or caught in a firefight in the Ardennes. And the fact that their ideas were finer and better than Hitler's will have done nothing to keep them and millions of their countrymen from harm, and nothing to get them out of its way.

You do not give evil a soapbox. Poking a tiger in a cage is not confronting evil.