Hope is alive again, & not just in America

(classified)

Oh shite, we are all (classified).

Variations on a Chequerboard Melody by Zander Zon : Click this link after you've viewed it to see the original

But watch this first! My camcorder was the missing link it seems...enjoy both blissfully beautiful performances here.

:)

The US Civil War (12/4/1861 - 5/11/2008)

Yesterday "Primary Colors" Author Joe Klein said that the American Civil War started with a battle in Virginia* in 1861& that it finally ended 147 years later (yesterday!) when incredibly, the Sate of Virginia gave it's electoral votes to an African American to take him past that magical 270 Electoral College Vote finishing line & make him the 44th POTUS. I watched his speech live here at 5am, tears welled a number of times, but especially when the TV cameras focussed on Jesse Jackson...what thoughts must have been going through his mind - that his friend Martin Luther King, did NOT after all, die in vain must have been foremost. A man with an Asian upbringing, with an African father, & a white American mother with European roots, he's even got a middle Eastern name. Truly the first Global US President for America & the whole world beyond. We finally have permission, after 8 long bleak years - to start loving the Dream that is America again.

YES HE DID!, (made history & brought us all back hope in our future & faith in the Dream that is America). Overnight I have gone to recoiling whenever I see the Stars & stripes to loving it all over again, & everything it stands for...sure is it not even central to my favourite image of all time?

www.flickr.com/photos/snappydessy/123758033/

My kids are "mixed race" too, just like Barack (God I HATE that term "mixed race", but you know what I mean!). So now I can dream about an Irish President one day, called James Ismail Cannon...or maybe even Jemma Ayesha Cannon, (after all we are on our SECOND female President here right now!).

:)))))))))))


:)

Jörg Haider ist tod - Gott Sei Dank

Four times over the alcohol limit. Double the speed limit. Always crossing the line, even in Death.

The television newsreader who announced his death ended her report with the message: "Dear Carinthians, I wish you as much strength as you need to get through this," while Haider's right-hand man Stefan Petzner, the new leader of the BZO, said the "sun has fallen from the sky".

"It's not, it's still there," says Carinthian writer Egyd Gstättner, who observed Haider for two decades. He talks in disgust of a "führer cult" surrounding Haider. On Monday morning, like every Carinthian schoolchild, his 10-year-old daughter was told by her religious affairs teacher to fill up a page of her exercise book with a black cross and Haider's name.

One of Haider's last acts was the establishment of what he called a sonderlager - a special camp for old, sick, and criminal asylum seekers, set on an isolated, 1,200-metre-high alpine pasture. He told his voters he planned to "concentrate" Chechens there, enabling the "final goal" of their extradition to be carried out more smoothly. In other countries politicians would be forced to resign over such issues. According to Florian Klenk, deputy editor of news magazine Falter, "In Austria the typical reaction was, "Well, that's just Haider. And actually he's right."

Save the life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh!

I can't believe this is happening. Whatever about the rights, (& mostly wrongs) of the Iraqi Invasion/occupation/debacle/tragedy/hell disaster - when I read in The Independent about the fundamentalists inflicting Sharia in Basra or Baghdad, I think - "well the US led invasion opened that particular Pandora's Box, the fools, what can we expect?"

In Afghanistan though, after 9/11, the Taleban hosting Bin Laden, etc...UN Resolutions, a "just" war against the real murderers of 9/11 & thier Allies, etc...the Pandora's Box of Jihadist/Islamic Fundamentalist intolerance & perverted beliefs was quite rightly been kept shut by military force, or at least the miscreants were being put back in thier hate filled & intolerant box by the UN led force in Afghanistan, & for what?

So "Sharia Lite" can now be imposed under the noses of the very Government that was "saved" by this UN led & morally justifiable military intervention?

I mean, HELLO!!!

If this outrageous sentence is not commuted, & indeed if these idiots from within are not stripped of all authority asap by President Karzi - what the hell are British Soldiers (among others) dying for exactly in Helmand Province right now?

What?