Fidel Castro and the Cuban government are once again tweaking his image. This time with an eight part docu-drama covering the 638 attempts they say have been made on his life.
Fidel may be on his last legs, but he’s going to make certain that his revolution lives on through his memory.
The production, directed by Rafael Ruiz Benitez is entitled “He who must live” and shows, according to NNT, “how Fidel’s life has always been in danger, threatened by 638 attacks plans which have been thwarted by the effective action the organs of state security, the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Cuban people.”
The first episode begins with the Granma yacht which took Fidel and 81 other guerrilla members to the site where they landed in eastern Cuba in 1956, and ends with the triumph of the Revolution.
The last episode covers the bombing of the auditorium of the University of Panama.
As a side note:
Reuters – Cuba severed diplomatic ties with Panama on Thursday in anger at it’s outgoing leader pardoning four Cuban exiles imprisoned for plotting to kill President Fidel Castro in 2000.
Panama’s conservative President Mireya Moscoso, who leaves office next week, said she freed the Cubans for humanitarian reasons.
Three of the plotters were Cuban-born U.S. citizens and on their release they flew directly to a small airport in Miami, where they were met by their families.
Cuba’s TV series features actors playing Batista, the CIA director Allen Dulles and, it is thought, presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who authorized the murder attempts. A thaw after Barack Obama’s election has ended with Washington and Havana trading insults but the US has forsworn killing Castro.
We’ve all read about the guy Who played StarCraft almost continuously for 50 hours. He went into cardiac arrest and died at a local hospital.
In a different case a Korean man stabbed his mother to death because she nagged him about playing too much on the internet. He then went to an internet cafe to continue his game.
Now we have a Korean couple who starved their three month old daughter to death while they raised a virtual child online.
Guardian.uk –South Korean police have arrested a couple for starving their three-month-old daughter to death while they devoted hours to playing a computer game that involved raising a virtual character of a young girl.
The 41-year-old man and 25-year-old woman, who met through a chat website, reportedly left their infant unattended while they went to internet cafes. They only occasionally dropped by to feed her powdered milk.
The police seem to think that the virtual world allowed them to escape their real life problems, including their daughter.
Mike over at the Hostility Blog thinks that the local power company(Nevada Energy) has raised the frequency of the power coming in to our homes from 60hz to 90hz, so the meters will run faster and they can charge more for the same amount of power. –He thinks he’s being charged for 3k every time he uses 1k.
According to a mutual friend, Mike is a systems administrator and programmer for a local finance company. He does his job well. Keeping the network up and making whatever changes are needed to the program. Proving that he’s not stupid.
Why then does he believe what anyone can disprove with an O-scope you ask?
Because, through the use of his superior intellect and phenomenal reasoning capabilities, he has managed to prove, using logic well beyond the ability of the common man to understand, that his power bill on his poorly insulated mobile home is “too high.” Therefore the power company, the source of all evil, has implemented a nefarious scheme to overload our circuits, burn out our motors and make our meters spin faster in order to collect three times as much money as they are entitled to. –It couldn’t be a rate increase or crappy insulation making his bill higher and it couldn’t possibly be happening to him alone, so it must be some kind of a conspiracy.
The human race: Providing endless hours of entertainment to logical people everywhere, since the beginning of time.
Tags: conspiracy, Nevada energy, power bill
This is an excerpt from Doug Hanchard’s blog titled:
How did Congress pass extension of U.S. Patriot Act? Ask your doctor
And then the roof caved in, H.R. 3961 – Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009 -was going through the House. Everyone in the House knew about the expiry of the existing extensions of the Patriot Act and thus was slipped as amendments to H.R. 3961. It was either that or watch H.R. 3961 face an uphill battle getting passed on the floor. According to the record, here is how the extension came to the floor as an amendment to H.R. 3961;
I won’t go in to the rest of the details, but I would advise you to read his entire post.
The problem I have with the process is the inherent deceit and dishonesty that our so called representatives use without hesitation, and without any sign of remorse that their bill is so unpopular that it can’t be passed on it’s own merit.
The patriot act is a violation of everything I would consider patriotic. It denies us rights, it assumes guilt and is abused by the police state.
Yes I used the phrase “POLICE STATE.” What else would you call it when an American citizen can be thrown in prison simply because someone didn’t like his name? What else would you call it when the police, in their myriad uniforms, have no oversight?
When the investigatory agencies find a violation of the law by various and sundry police agencies and can’t find a way to bury it, they announce it publicly. And by God they’ll step up and say the law has been violated again if it doesn’t stop.
The law has no teeth; after all, how do you punish an entire agency?
On top of everything else, the NSA / AT&T debacle shows that even if it can be proven that the law has been deliberately violated and names can be provided, the Whitehouse will protect that agency or company. This is done in the name of “national security.”
We have a constitution and a bill of rights that are supposed to protect our freedoms. –Instead they are twisted, ignored or made exception to, because some politician or group of politicians has an agenda.
The bills congress passes are not for our benefit. They are to feed the egos, further the agendas or profit the friends of those in power. And most importantly, they are there to control the peasants.
An Australian man was justifiably sacked(fired) for repeated safety violations. But because of his lack of education and the unlikely prospect of his finding another job, the valid sacking was invalidated and the company was forced to rehire him with compensation.
www.theaustralian.com.au –The nation’s industrial umpire has ruled that a long-term employee who was legitimately sacked for repeated safety breaches must be reinstated and paid compensation because of his poor education and poor job prospects.
It would appear that in land down under being judged too dumb to find another job is the perfect form of job security.
Reprinted with permission from RCNevada:
If you think that concerns over Google Buzz and privacy are over blown here are some excerpts from fugitivus via Gizmodo:
Fuck You, Google:
I can’t block these people, because I never made a Google profile or Buzz profile, due to privacy concerns (apparently and resoundingly founded!).
Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.
Fuck you, Google. You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.
Thanks to Google’s completely self absorbed, “fuck your privacy” attitude, fugitivus now requires a login to view.
WTF ever happened to “don’t be evil?” —Oh yeah, they dropped that.
How about a new one: Greed over good.
Did you know that if you use a Gmail account Buzz is automatically active?
If you don’t use Buzz and want to make sure they don’t share your contacts anyway, log in to your gmail account and look at the very bottom of the email page, where in microscopic print you will find a link to “turn off Buzz.” —Click that, and hopefully it will stop Google from sharing your contacts. (Strange that I don’t recall them mentioning that opt-out.)
You always picture Olympic athletes driving themselves as hard as humanly possible for the love of the sport and the pride of winning.
Maybe some are, but it turns out that gold medals are worth more than their weight in real gold, according to this article in RT.
The Russians are reportedly paying their top athletes 100,00 euros for gold, 60,000 for silver and 40,000 for bronze. Plus a car from the Fund for the Support of Olympians of Russia. There are also reported to be houses and land for some local heroes.
Canada on the other hand is paying a mere $25,000C for gold with $15,000 and $10,000 for silver and bronze respectively.
The US is reportedly paying about the same as the Canadians, but American sporting officials are planning to drastically increase the amount of prize money by London 2012.
Karaoke is a major form of entertainment in some neighborhoods in the Philippines. In fact it’s fans are so enthusiastic that fights and stabbings over the way a song is rendered are fairly common.
NYT: By NORIMITSU ONISHI Published: February 6, 2010 – The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Here in the states, a Seattle woman punched a man because she didn’t like the way he sang “Yellow.”
A friend of mine and I used to listen the Karaoke singers at a local bar and some of them were so bad that we would make fun of them but it was hardly worth getting in a fight over. –In the P.I.s on the other hand, an off duty policeman pulled his revolver when the people at the next table laughed at one of the singers. -I guess the cop was a big fan.
“The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence.
The lessons to be learned from this: Don’t hog the stage, if you can’t sing, stay the hell away from the mic, and if you travel to the Philippines -a country with over a million illegal guns and a reputation for violence- Do Not sing Sinatra.
When you think of radical religious leaders trying to maintain absolute control of their followers you normally think of the Muslims and certain fanatical imams.
–How about thinking instead about Israel’s Haredi rabbis.
These ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who’s followers live in walled enclaves, isolated from the rest of society, yearn for a return to the dark ages where religion ruled everything and outside influence was forbidden.
These religious leaders have ranted and raved about the dangers of the internet for years and want kosher filters on cellphones so no one may read or see anything that they haven’t pre-approved.
In one infamous incident, the family of Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, had a 17-year-old boy kidnapped and beaten at knifepoint after he became acquainted with the rabbi’s daughter through an Internet chat room and later met her unchaperoned – an ultra-Orthodox taboo. Amar was not charged in the case.
Now according to the Washington Post a number of Haredi rabbis are calling for a boycott of web sites built and run by Haredi Jews. Saying the sites, which allow free discussion, with irreverent and unmonitored reader responses – including direct criticism of rabbis’ authority, are disseminating “gossip, slander … filth and abominations.” –None of these sites offer porn, profanity or other material that has traditionally raised the ire of these rabbis. They simply allow freedom tho discuss topics that make the rabbis uncomfortable and challenge their authority..
It’s impossible for a stone age mentality to compete with the freedom of the internet so they fear it.
Johnathan Swift: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
In Vietnam four men were arrested in June and charged with spreading spreading anti-government propaganda.
Le Cong Dinh, a human rights attorney, best known for defending Vietnamese interests in the selling of cheap catfish against charges brought by US catfish farmers.
Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, a man described as an internet entrepreneur.
Nguyen Tien Trung, the leader of the Assembly of Vietnamese Youth for Democracy.
Le Thang Long, a member of the “Chan research group.” –In his “defense?” Le Thang Long produced 29 documents, 13 of which contained information describing plans to encourage the people to overthrow the government.
Early this month state prosecutors dropped the propaganda charges and the men were charged instead with subversion, which carries a maximum possible sentence of death.
After a day-long trial, all four men were convicted of “activities aimed at subverting the people’s administration”. With sentences ranging from five years for Le Cong Dinh to sixteen years for Tran Huynh Duy Thuc.
Four men tried and convicted under differing parts of the penal code, with one trial lasting one day. Now that’s efficient.
Read more here.
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