Hitchens on Islam ~ "God Is Not Great" ~ Ch 9...

Christopher Hitchens on Islam -- reading Chapter 9 of his God is Not Great ~ How Religion Poisons Everything...

"Hitchens asserts that there is no evidence for any of the "miraculous" claims about Muhammad, and that the Koran's origin was not supernatural. Hitchens contends that the religion was fabricated by Muhammad or his followers and that it was borrowed from other religious texts, and the hadith was taken from common maxims and sayings which developed throughout Arabia and Persia at the time. Hitchens also identifies similarities between Islam and Christianity, as well as identifying plagiarisms of the Jewish faith."

Hitchens further clarifies about Islam... And more generally, how ridiculous religion is... Protecting Danish cartoonists -- pointing out that we must judge religions by their extremes (and extremists)... Finally, Hitchens debates Islamite...

No Great Religions ~ All Stupid and Dangerous...

Friendly Atheist spots Bill Maher on Kimmel telling truth to power:

"There are No Great Religions. They are all stupid and dangerous. And we should insult them."

Later, Maher hosts Rushdie, et al, on Real Time and the scathing continues...

No Ordinary Teacher ~ Gul-e-Khandana Inspires!

Rina Saeed Khan writes in the Guardian Weekly about the valley where girls are the future...

"In a rundown building in the mountain village of Sijban, girls sit at their desks, hair loosely covered in white or black scarves, staring raptly at their teacher. They say they want to become either doctors or teachers when they grow up. This is the one government primary school for girls in the Swat valley that was spared destruction by the Taliban. Their headteacher, Gul-e-Khandana, is no ordinary teacher -- she stood up to the Taliban and managed to save the school [...] now the Taliban have left the valley, enrolment is increasing. "More girls are coming back and many want to go on to college. There is a change; parents are willing to encourage their daughters. As for the girls, you can see the happiness on their faces, they are so happy to be back in a proper school again. Many lost almost two years of their studies." The Taliban destroyed more than 400 of the 1,576 schools in Swat. "Seventy percent of them were girls' schools," [...] as the conflict with the government intensified they started destroying both boys' schools as well as girls' schools. It was a terrible time. How can you build a nation without education?" [...] Gul-e-Khandana believes that girls are the future for Pakistan. "Above all, girls must be educated," she says. "When one girl is educated, she educates her entire household. The role of women is very important in our society -- it is they who can change our way of life for the better."

If a Tree Falls ~ Eco-Terrorism Documentary...

Thanks to NYTimes DotEarthling Andrew Revkin for spotting new documentary If a Tree Falls about the eco-terrorist Earth Liberation Front. Revkin interviews the director, Marshall Curry who mentions this important nugget asking how best to...

"...respond to non-violent civil disobedience. In the 90s the police use of tear gas and pepper-spray and nightsticks at protests radicalized a lot of activists and convinced them that the democratic system was broken. A portion of those people decided to take up arson in response. I think the film is suddenly a really important cautionary tale to activists to think carefully about tactics, and also a cautionary tale to law enforcement to think about their response to activism, because some responses bring people into the democratic argument and some responses radicalize people."

See If a Tree Falls trailer...

Anti-Riot Tech ~ "Pain Ray" Active Denial System

To combat riotous scum, additional tools are needed. The Active Denial System looks promising...

"...a non-lethal, directed-energy weapon developed by the U.S. military. It is a strong millimeter-wave transmitter primarily used for crowd control (the "goodbye effect"). [...] Informally, the weapon is also called pain ray."

Broom Army ~ Taking Out the Terrorist Trash...

The "feral rats" continue to infest London and other UK cities, but everyday citizens disgusted by wanton criminality and mob terrorism -- and these riotous scum (yes, scum) are indeed morally and behaviorally terrorists -- are fighting back as the Broom Army. If you recognize the scum, say the word to the papers or authorities.

Mihag Gedi Farah ~ Face of East African Disaster

Wil Longbottom writes in the DailyMail of the growing humanitarian disaster in East Africa, a situation we all can see from the essential images by photographer Schalk van Zuydam...

"Cradled in his mother's arms, this is the face of a skeletal seven-month-old baby starving to death in the Horn of Africa. Weighing just seven pounds -- as much as a newborn -- Mihag Gedi Farah stares wide-eyed, his skin pulled taut over his ribs and tiny arms. Mihag is just one of 800,000 children who officials warn could die across the region in the worst drought for decades. Aid workers are rushing to bring help to dangerous and previously unreached regions of drought-ravaged Somalia. Many starving children and adults remain in the country far from the feeding tubes and doctors in field hospitals in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Sirat Amine, a nurse-nutrionist with the International Rescue Committee, said Mihag has just a 50-50 chance of survival. The little boy should weigh three times what he does now. His mother, Asiah Dagane, said: 'In my mind, I'm not well. My baby is sick. In my head, I am also sick.' A nurse at the camp said Mihag was 'severely, severely malnourished'. She added: 'We never tell the mother, of course, that their baby might not make it. We try to give them hope.' Mrs Dagane brought Mihag and four siblings from Kismayo to Kenya after all their sheep and cattle died. Their journey took a week."

How the hell could this happen?! What the F#<& is going on?

"Tens of thousands of Somalis are fleeing the starvation, many of them on foot, from Kismayo and the capital Mogadishu. The UN estimates that more than 11 million people in East Africa are affected by the drought, with 3.7 million in Somalia among the worst-hit because of the ongoing civil war in the country. Somalia's prolonged drought became a famine because neither the government nor many aid agencies can operate in areas controlled by Al Qaeda-linked militants."

So what we have here, as a minimum, is a natural disaster in an environmentally and economically vulnerable region compounded by yet more religio-fascist terrorism turning the situation into an enormous humanitarian atrocity.

P.S. On 11 Nov 2011, the DailyMail writes that Minhaj Gedi Farah is...

"...now recovered after being treated by the International Rescue Committee's hospital in Dadaab [...] After three life-saving blood transfusions and intensive feeding with Plumpy’nut, a vitamin-enriched peanut paste, Minhaj reached 4.1kgs (9.03 pounds) and was released from the hospital and treated for tuberculosis in an IRC outpatient program. Today, three months after he was released, Minhaj is unrecognizable. 'His mother never thought he would recover. Every member of his family is happy,' said Sirat Amin, a nurse-nutritionist."