Tag Archives: China

Turkey’s Kurds and China’s Tibetans

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The Dalai Lama accused of inciting riotThe Western corporate press is non-stop reporting on China’s suppression of the rebellion by its small Tibetan minority of about 6 million Tibetans, out of a nation of 1.3 billion. Many in the US support independence for a portion of Tibet, which would take away about 1/5 of Chinese territory if it were to take place.

China has about 21% of the world’s entire population. The bossy US has about 5%, so let’s see how the support for other peoples plays out in US press coverage of the current Kurdish rebellion in Turkey? Are we paying much attention to it? Turkish police clash with Kurds

What? Hadn’t heard about it yet? I’ve seen plenty of Free Tibet signs in town here in Colorado Springs, but have yet to see even one calling for Free Kurdistan. Why might that be? Why is nobody in the US calling for an independent Kurdistan for Turkey’s Kurds?

Kurds make up about 1/5 to 1/4 of Turkey’s total population of 70 million. These Turkish Kurds are over 1/2 of the total Kurdish population worldwide. If Americans are so worked up over the national rights of Albanians in Kosovo and the Tibetans in China, why are they so silent on the rights of the Kurds in Turkey? What’s with us dumb Americans? Is it that we are that politically and geographically illiterate, Virginia? (asking my Mom and my cat) Is it that we think the Turkish government to be ‘democratic’? lol…

I just don’t know…

Tibetans riot in China

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Tibetans inhabit the poorest province of China, and the average income is only about $400 per year. The Tibetans are an oppressed minority in a capitalist China run by a single party, the very much corrupted Chinese Communist Party, and they occupy a terrain that is a gigantic part of China yet that is very sparsely populated. That makes them a perfect target for US and European manipulation, in the West’s war to marginalize China away from their own control of world power.

Many Western intellectual types are fond of Buddhism, which they see as a peaceful and nonviolent alternative to the dominant religion of their own countries, which is Christianity. They associate Tibet with Buddhism. They love the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan aristocracy in exile, who is also considered a spiritual Buddhist leader. These Western intellectuals think that all that is Tibetan relates somehow to their beliefs that non-violence is the only method to bring about change in the world, or to achieve inner peace.
However, the rioters in Tibet do not support much anything at all to do with that philosophy. These Buddhist monks and their supporters attacked stores, and burned cars in the streets. They rioted.

see… Dozens killed in Tibetan protests

This event had more in common with the LA riots than with any peaceful, supposedly non-violent religion. This was the action of not only an outraged ethnic grouping, but also a relgious grouping that thinks it is getting a raw deal from the dominant ethnic group. They probably are, but the Western governments are no more concerned about Tibetan welfare than they are about Albanian welfare.

Still, the US and European government see Tibet as a grand opportunity to manipulate Western opinion against Chinese nationalism, in favor of their own nationalisms. That is simply a fact.

See video of riots…. Cars burn in Tibet riots Hardly just ‘non-violence’ in action.

Bush does math the same way he does English…

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Like “nukular” or “is our children learning”

Take for instance, the lies told to get us into Iraq errr Iran errrr D) all of the above. The crazy dictator who was poised to attack his neighbors, the threat to world security, the anthrax, smallpox, mousepox, yellow cake Uranium, and of course the 500 metric tonnes of Nerve Gas… 1,102,311.3 pounds… which is substantially more than Zero. zilch nada rien nix bupkis… (I checked the actual conversion on a units calculator).

Now, I never learned the formulae for Algebra or Calculus or even most Geometry. I know that Pie are round and Cornbread are squared.

I can do math intuitively. Most of the time it works.

A trillion dollars is 1 million squared. 1,000,000 x 1,000,000. it’s been pointed out that even a trillion mosquitoes would be hard to lose, misplace, hide…
…and they weigh less than a tenth of a gram.

(Except for the east Texas mosquitoes, the ones you carry an extra shotgun with you in order to provide Anti-aircraft fire against them… big as turkeys, and everybody gets a drumstick…)

But the low estimate is that a Trillion dollars is well, unACCOUNTed for. The money missing from the Republican party’s own trust fund is by their published estimate, $990,000, or 99% of a million.

And of course, having a cool Megabucks walk away without permission, and the Senators on the watchdog accounting agency give the investigators a blatantly forged document that’s allegedly an “internal audit”,
the Great Bunch of Guys who did this are the ones who say the missing funds are just under a mill…

and the regulators and investigators who say that it’s over 3 million, why they’re just lying…

A projected $5 Terabucks surplus has not only been wiped, but now is a $5 trillion deficit.

Bush’s own investments in Carlyle Group, heavily damaged by their predatory lending practices, coupled with quickly laundering the funds by selling the bogus mortgages, They just almost got wiped out but a miracle occurred, they got a bailout.

Not the people who lost their homes, no, they still have to “git out! Now!”…

Now, you don’t hear that very loudly spoken on the news… Just as a Deus ex Machina coincidence, that announcement was made while the Bush-anointed federal prosecutors were handcuffing the “Sheriff of Wall Street”, the most powerful overseer and regulator and, the one most outspoken against the Bush deregulation and the havoc it was known beforehand that it would cause..
Over a prostitution scandal.

That scandal kind of overwhelms the 220 Billion dollars that are being used to bail out a company in which the President of the United States has large holdings.

220 billion just as a coincidence is 8 months of budget for “tax & spend Democrat Liberal” Jimmy Carter.

His entire budget for his entire term of office came to just over a trillion. Which is just under a third of the budget for this year for Bush.

that’s one Very Bad error in basic math the BushMaster made.

More to follow…

More statistics to sleep on

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I hear that less than 25% of the American public knows approximately how many US soldiers have died in Iraq. The total as of today is 3,986. Two other US statistics of note: of men in prison and teenage girls:

The 4,000 death was predicted to fall a month from now, until a casual suicide bomber ambled up to a group of our soldiers. The death toll was five, though I find it beyond curious that Iraqi observers were insistent it had been six.

ONE PERCENT of all Americans is behind bars. The number represents 7% of all Black Americans, 11% of young black males, and 3% of Hispanic males. The work gulag capitalist enterprise system in China boasts the next highest incarceration rate, where the percentage of the Chinese population imprisoned is 0.1%.

One in four teenage American girls have an STD. That’s three million girls aged 14-19. 48% of all black girls, 20% of white girls. In 18% of the cases the STD is genital warts.

Propagandist for Jews only Israel in town ‘for Darfur’ end of month

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I just got a notice from a leader and promoter of the local ‘Save Darfur’ crowd, that LA film director Mark Jonathan Harris would be in town the end of March pushing the need to intervene against Sudan and China in Africa. While the multiple civil wars in Sudan have been horribly destructive of human life and I wish for them to end like yesterday, I know where this campaign is getting its biggest push from. It is getting it from the Go-Zionism lobby that operates and flourishes in D.C., Florida, and Hollywood.

This film director, Mark Harris, has been sponsored before via The US Holocaust Museum, which is partially funded with America’s tax monies, though it principally promotes the foreign agenda of Israel. The principal angle the US Holocaust Museum is always working, is that US militarism is absolutely necessary to protect others from genocides, which of course, the US government is never supposedly responsible for. What a dubious supposition, too! But then again, what would one expect would be the main argument of an institution that is partially sponsored by our own government?

Harris is intimately tied to the US Holocaust Museum through one of his previous works (well promoted by ‘the museum’) about Jewish orphans after WW2. One will probably never get to see him doing a work about Palestinian, Afghan, or Iraqi orphans though, even if now he has a film out to supposedly educate the public about the need to ‘Save Darfur’.

Israel is trying so hard to justify their own repression against the Arab population the Jewish state has displaced and continues to displace, that the US Holocaust Museum is investing much of its funds to take public eyes off all the current Jewish and American sponsored slaughter thoughout the world. Through it’s joining and sponsoring the campaign to supposedly ‘Save Darfur’, The US Holocaust Museum hopes to justify the concept of supposedly just and humanitarian interventions coming from The Empire’s military power.

‘Genocide, Genocide, Genocide’ is what they want you to hear for the next 1,000 years, and they want you to hear it in a way that would justify next to anything Jewish Apartheid Israel might do to make itself yet larger in territory stolen away from another group of people. A US grab for Sudanese oil is nothing to them compared to their own desire to help Jewish Israel grab yet more land.

Mark Jonathan Harris and the US Holocaust Museum want to operate like stealth bombers inside the ‘Save Darfur’ push by the Israeli propaganda squad. It is important that the general American public not realize that this is part of a Zionist campaign, so The US Holocaust Museum’s front group is called Genocide Intervention Network instead. It’s a case really, of an institution sponsored by 2 governments (Israel and the US are behind the US Holocaust Museum), posing itself off as an activist coalition.

Actually, the only real thing important to Israel is to try to revitalize the idea that US government ‘humanitarian intervention’ will be needed over and over again. That is their big lie. Without it, Apartheid Jewish Israel would stand alone in the world.

Saving Darfur means less than nothing to Zionists. And neither does saving Sudan. They merely want to save Zionist Jews from world disapproval by distracting attention elsewhere. So far, they have partially succeeded, so beware new wars because of that. And yes, it’s a shame that some proPeace activists have gotten sucked into this Zionist campaign.

Racial separatism can be promoted as a supposedly humanitarian objective, but it really is not. Neither in Sudan, nor Israel/Palestine.

Sudan ultimately just cannot benefit by Europeans and Americans ‘saving it’, and then dividing it up into multiple new ‘countries’. See Iraq and Afghanistan today to get a take on what is meant by stating such. Partition under the direction of The Empire may ultimately be the fate that awaits all 3 of these widely different regions (present day Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan), unless, of course, we can stop this continual military interventionism by the US.

World Economy 101

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Graph showing US, China and India shares of world output.Here is a graph that I think illustrates world economic history quite well in a very simple way. It takes three countries and charts their portions of the world economy over 2 centuries. The three countries are the US, India, and China. See the graph Output and Outlook

Ignore the conclusion of the Harvard Professor, Greg Mankiw, as he glowingly quotes Michael Milken of the Wall Street Journal. Both these guys are American apologist buffoons who overlook the obvious about the graph they are looking at.

In 1820 India and China held almost 50% of the world’s economic output between themselves, whereas the US had less than 2% of it. But just about then the US was importing slaves ripped away from the African continent by European imperialism. As this stolen wealth in human slaves accumulated in the US and was used as labor in agricultural production, the US portion of world wealth shot up, and later not even the Civil War could brake it.

And then, European imperialism began to spread its hooks and tentacles toward India and China, where they began to colonize the 2 regions. Now you see the swing begin downward in the Chinese and Indian portions of world wealth as they were bled drier and drier by the Europeans, and in the case of the Chinese also by Japan.

It is only in the 1980’s where China, and a lesser extent India began to recover some. That was when both societies began to recuperate themselves some from the destructive effects of colonial occupation.

Since the end of WW2, the European countries and the US have had to discard colonialism and embrace neo-colonialism, where the looting of other countries is done primarily through economic structures (banks and lending institutions), and not military ones of direct occupation.

Now with the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, we see the US Empire beginning to return to using the old methods of traditional colonialism by direct military occupation to loot other countries’ wealth to enrich its own treasuries. Or at least, this seems to be the current direction where US government is now trying to implement its foreign policies.

Direct colonization by occupation troops does not have a recent history of being successful though, except in the case of the construction of the Jewish Apartheid state of Israel. The US occupation of Iraq is somewhat an extension and outgrowth of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, while the occupation of Afghanistan is more a remote fortress garrison occupation than a direct colonization attempt of any sort.

So what we have is the US Empire today directing a kind of hybrid imperialism where traditional colonialism is fused with neo-colonialism, and then again with a sort of return to the old colonial style fortess enclave structures, like the British and Portugese used to specialize in.

But now, we are off some from the theme of the simple educational graph that we linked to.

Scientists find abundance in scarcity

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I heard today about an Abundance Study of sharks off of Catalina Island. Knowing that such studies are finding sharks no longer in abundance, the title seems contrived to suggest otherwise. Yes, frequency and abundance are scientific measures, but they mean count, don’t they? These days we’ve come to expect government scientists to politicize what could otherwise have been called a population survey. Here “abundance” is a scale that also implies a measure on the scale, in this case positive. As with “number” or “charge,” we infer there is one. Perhaps the shark researchers opted not to call it a scarcity study for fear of jinxing their sharks.

Unfortunately by misrepresenting the “abundance” of sharks, the scientists do nothing to arrest mankind’s Jaws-inspired crusade to hunt down every last one.

A similar measure could be health, aka our nation’s Health Care System. Our health could be terrible, but in advance of declaring a condition, it can be surmised that we have health.

Can you think of other examples? Height? Wealth? Potential? Confidence? Stability? As a measure of our economy, these terms should be declared inviolate. Guard them from the machinations of media think tank word-smiths who find themselves needing to spin our economic collapse upward.

Greg Mortenson’s own cup of tea

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In his own words, Greg Mortenson is quite a bit more revealing about his motives in Pakistan. Pax Americana is definitely a subtlety lost on him.
 
Central Asian regions where CAI has financed constructionThis map is from the Central Asia Institute‘s own brochure. It shows the parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson’s CAI has helped finance community building projects. I thought the shaded area formed an interesting buffer zone along the border to… CHINA! Is that region of greater interest peacewise than the war-torn borders facing Afghanistan or India?!

The current Independent features a cover story on Mortensen, to promote his Jan 15 Colorado College appearance. It turns out he’s as inarticulate as his dictation of Three Cups of Tea suggests. Here’s how Mortenson regards his unwitting Islamic accomplices:

…we bring in mullahs who support girls’ education. We have two ex-Taliban who are now teaching in our girls’ schools and have become some of our biggest proponents. It’s somewhat similar to an ex-smoker or an alcoholic who has changed and becomes very against smoking or drinking.

Here Mortenson describes how his schools convince Muslim communities to enroll their girls:

We even use good old-fashioned Western capitalism. We go and tell a mullah: If I want to marry a girl in your village, how many goats do I owe you? He might say five goats. If she has a fifth-grade education, how many goats would I then have to pay you? And the answer would probably be 15 to 20 goats. A goat is usually $30 to $40 each.

And then we tell the mullah: If all the girls are educated, just think of how much more wealth you’d have. Then you can see his eyes get bigger.

At least Mortenson is up front about the Capitalist invasion for which he plays scout. Evidently the untapped region’s girls are for sale, and once educated they’ll have value-added for mercantilism.

American society tends to glorify education for its own sake. What “education” is CAI providing to the Muslims exactly? Do CAI’s texts teach that secular culture is intent on the eradication of spiritual culture? Is the CAI curriculum simply favoring western indoctrination over an Islamist counterpart? I’ll let Mortenson show his hand:

perhaps the most controversial, is our Islamic studies for about two or three hours every week. It’s very tempered, and we include in that learning the differences between Sunni and Shia. We’ve also added what you might call religion studies, or learning about different faiths or religion.

In a monotheistic society you need that like emperor penguins need tap dancing lessons. Imagine the uproar if we tried to teach New Life Church kids that the faith of their parents was only one extreme of many! A good idea no doubt, but unlikely to provoke a peaceful reaction.

POSTSCRIPT
Our junior high student came home yesterday with three promotional pieces about Three Cups of Tea in advance of Mortenson making an appearance at her school. Do you wonder how he’s getting such press? One of the pamphlets instructs the children about how they can “Help Three Cups of Tea (3CT) surge:” (My emphasis, their slip of the forked tongue)

1. Recommend 3CT to at least one person or place: family, friend, colleague, book club, professor and teacher, student, and places of worship. It also makes a great gift! (You’ve got to be kidding me! 3CT practically screams you’re illiterate.)

2. Visit 3CT website…

3. Recommend 3CT for ‘One Book – One Read’ at http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/one-book.html (please don’t).

4. Recommend 3CT as a University or college-wide… read http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070607/7summer.htm (YGTBFKM)

5. Ask bookstores without 3CT to stock the book, especially airport bookstores. (?)

6. Send 3CT with a personal note to your Senators and/or Representatives (US legislators, why?)

7. Write a ‘letter editor’ [sic] to suggest 3CT and to support education and literacy… to promote peace, economic development and prosperity. (Emphasis mine. Co-opting Muslim girls for Capitalism promotes peace how?)

8. Ask magazines, newspapers, or radio station [sic] to review 3CT (they suggest sending a copy)

9. Learn about the power of girls’ education… in What Works in Girls Education (by Neocon think tank author Barbara Hertz)

10. Learn about grassroots book promotion…

11. Suggest 3CT to Oprah: http://www.oprah.com/email/reach/email_showideas.jhtml

12. Suggest 3CT to C-Span 202-737-0580.

13. Write a book review on Amazon.com, bn.com… (No need, it’s getting slammed! Too bad my Junior High principle isn’t getting a clue. Are our teachers illiterate too?)

14. Start Pennies For Peace in your school, library, or place of worship… http://www.penniesforpeace.org

Billions for war, but apparently we need only pennies for peace.

Hopefully 3CT’s proceeds are going toward peace. (Marie reports their financials say it’s “up to 7%,” so hey, they do mean single-cent figures!) Perhaps Mortenson can earmark some of the Coins for Cultural Sensitivity.

POST-POSTSCRIPT
The Amazon reviews are uproarious! But 3CT trolls are loading the funniest with bad marks where it asks Do you find this review helpful, so you’ll have to look fast. I’ll reprint a couple below.

By the way, Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… was originally released as Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations. It wasn’t selling the mission?

I’ll work up my own slipcover for Mortenson’s speaking engagement, with help from the comments below. Hopefully he’ll be good-natured enough to sign it:
Three Cups of Tedium: One Man’s Mission to be a Dhimmi
-A Condescending Westerner who attempt to “educate” Muslims.

(This is part 2 of 3 pieces: a review of the 3CT book, the promotion around the book tour, and Mortenson’s public appearance.)

Go Team Tibet!

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Beijing 2008 Game Over Free TibetI love love love the Olympics. The Olympic Games epitomize humankind’s best and highest physical achievement, our ability to live in peace with other countries, to ignore race and to play fair, if only for a time. Sitius, altius, fortius indeed!

Historically, because the International Olympic Committee has avoided entanglement in world politics, the Olympics have had a larger number of team participants than there are UN-recognized countries. Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Taiwan have been allowed to send teams to the Games despite their status as possessions of other nations. Even during the Cold War, athletic contests leading up to the Olympics took place behind the Iron Curtain. Talk to any Olympic athlete. They’ve been places that were off-limits to the rest of us. International sport transcends politics. And so it should.

This month the International Olympic Committee betrayed egalitarian tradition and denied the nation of Tibet a place at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Tibet, illegally-occupied by China since 1949, will not be allowed to field an Olympic team because China claims ownership of their land and their people. To add insult, China has plans to take the Olympic torch to the top of Mt. Everest, a mountain that rightfully belongs to Tibet and Nepal, to solidify its “ownership” of Tibet in the eyes of the world. China has already stepped up its presence at Everest, an easily identifiable landmark to Westerners, in anticipation of the propaganda campaign to come.

China should never have been chosen to host the Olympics in the first place. Countries with a history of egregious human rights violations have traditionally been disqualified as potential Olympic hosts. China bullshitted the IOC with progress and promises. We’re different now! Look how far we’ve come! And for whatever reason, monetary or political gain, good television potential, or maybe just plain old ignorance, the IOC bought the lie. And now they’ve become complicitous in Tibet’s oppression.

So when you see that beautiful Olympic torch, that symbol of good fellowship and unity, carried up Mt. Everest in May by the Chinese, remember that the Tibetan people have been denied their land, their identity, their religious and cultural practices, and a place at the Beijing games. You’ll have to count on memory, because you won’t see any protests during the climb. China has already warned foreigners about engaging in activities concerning the sovereignty and unity of China. Tibetans and Chinese won’t dare make a public spectacle; they know they’ll be shot on sight. Even now, four American citizens are being detained by the Chinese government for unfurling a banner calling for Tibet’s independence during a recent torch relay assessment.

I’m sure the worldwide media will honor the Chinese request for silence and make nary a peep about human rights violations in Tibet and elsewhere. And it’s going to make me sick sick sick.

Ugly Dolls more than skin deep

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Handcrafted to look sloppyDo you remember several years ago, when Ugly Dolls crawled out of the Cabbage Patch like that season’s Troll Doll? We have an obsession with fugly. Except they were trendy, hand sewn in someone’s attic and sold at exclusive boutiques, but had the aesthetic sophistication of sock monkeys, sharing 98% of their DNA.

Uglydolls were the must-have gift for those whose taste was thread-bare chic. These eclectic one-of-a-kind one-offs were, it appeared, sewn by a single hand, or at most by several one-handed cottage industrialists. The design called for single flat panels stitched together without too much care, with scraps fastened cockeye to form the features. Of course the price you paid for such deliberate off-the-wall on-the-mark anti-production-value plush toys reflected where you could get them. Melrose Avenue haute-suture or Ebay.

I found an Uglydoll display at a local boutique and saw the burgeoning cast of character-actors and side-kicks the collection has become. Plus now, to spare the mythical not-so-nimble seamstresses behind the first batch, these new generation Uglies herald from China. There is no good reason I suppose to deny the mass market access to the fruit of playful creative ninnies. But lo, the price tags are still show-off high! Is there no consumer benefit to derive from 55¢/hr wages?

Running shoes which are priced $150 at retail cost less than $2 to make. But we know Nike has to recoup an incredible amount for R&D. They’ve got us running on air for goodness sake, that technological leap had to be expensive. Plus someone’s got to pony up for the clever ads. Nike CEO Phil Knight doesn’t advertise just for the sake of his vanity.

The only engineering required with ugly plush toys is how to inject into the factory process the “slight variations which enhances [sic] their appearance of uniqueness.” Can you picture Chinese overseers enforcing deliberately sloppy -but fastidious- handiwork?

So why would the prices be kept so high? Even if sold only through specialty stores which require a 100% Keystone markup, there would still be leeway.

Can you do the math? Probably the labor expended to make one plush toy would remain constant over the varying production scenarios. Let’s compare the options: Manufacturing wages in the US have declined sharply, but at $12/hour, for how much did they have to sell the original Ugly? If we were considering a sweatshop in Los Angeles, the wage would be $4-$6/hour. So now we’ve half-ed it. Contracting a factory in Saipan or Guam, among the US possessions, would mean half again as much, $2-$3/hour and we’d still get to say MADE IN AMERICA. Moving the production to Mainland China means a prison wage of $0.55/hour. That’s less than 1/20th of the original cost.

Unless we hear news reports of Chinese laborers landing dream jobs sewing Ugly Dolls from straw to gold, somebody is making quite a grotesque, not even fugly, mark-up.

Christmas ornaments from child labor

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Children making ARTIC FUN Christmas ornaments for Walmart
Walmart is in trouble again. It’s selling Christmas ornaments which an investigation by the National Labor Committee has determined are produced in sub-standard conditions. Chiefly, that the young workers who produced the ornaments, in an 8,000 person factory in Canton China, are being paid piecemeal instead of the minimum 55¢/hour, resulting in wages as low as 26¢/hour.

Not to trivialize the monetary difference, but there were other workplace details for which Walmart was not being flagged. Could this imply that these factors might apply to other Chinese or third world products still being made for Walmart, Target and the other big-box retailers?

Ready? The assembly line workers were often children, some as young as 12 years old, loaned to the factory by their schools, who worked 15 hour days, seven days a week. Workers taking a day off were docked two and a half days pay. Also the children were working with paints and chemicals without protective gear such as gloves or masks.

Jamie Leigh Jones is still locked in a box

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Jamie Leigh Jones KBR HalliburtonWhen they teach in math class about the square roots of numbers, you invariably encounter the paradox of negative numbers. Since neither two positive factors nor two negatives can produce a negative, you’re told the square root of a negative is “irreducible” and you must leave the equation be. It turns out that this explanation was really a matter of convenience, because later in the year students revisit the square root of -1 and learn it can be called an imaginary number. Now you were expected to solve the equation, and zoom, math took off from there. I remember feeling betrayed that math had become an abstraction, so comfortable was I to be stuck at the simpler impasse.

I use this analogy to contemplate some oversimplifications about law which are being used to temper moral indignation at the machinations of our government. We’re told, for example, that we’ve subverted the rule of law in Iraq, that enemy combatants are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, that Guantanamo Cuba falls neither under Cuban law nor our dominion. We’re told the International Criminal courts do not have jurisdiction over Americans and we’re told our contractor-mercenaries are exempt from anyone’s prosecution. Those legal impediments to justice are not only imaginary, to say it in legalese, they’re balderdash.

My math teacher had a educational reason to maintain that the square root of -1 was unsolvable. Whatever motive does anyone have to keep the American public in the dark about the suspension of human rights?

NBC has just trumpeted the tragic case of Jamie Leigh Jones, but presumes simultaneously to reinforce the aforementioned balderdash. Two years ago Jones was gang raped by KBR coworkers in Iraq and kept in a shipping container until she was able to convince one of her keepers to lend her a cell phone. Her father then called a congressman who called the State Department who sent agents over to KBR’s compound in the Green Zone to set her free. Since that time, the feds have dropped the case, the rape-kit evidence has gone missing, KBR claims it has been ordered to conduct no investigation, and Jones is left with no recourse but to file a civil suit. Now she is being told that an arbitration clause in her contract prevents her from doing even that.

The truths being asserted, as indignant as they might make us feel, are that contractors in Iraq are outside the reach of any law. Specifically Iraqi law, as dictated by Viceroy Bremer’s famous contractor indemnity clause, but by inference, US law, because Iraq is a “sovereign nation,” and International Law, because otherwise our whole country could be held accountable for what it’s perpetrated there.

I’ve even read it asserted that two years marks the expiration of Jone’s right to redress from her attackers. Wherever have you heard of so short a statute of limitation for rape?

Another assumption attempts to bolster the impregnability of arbitration clauses which have become de rigueur in corporate employment contracts. Such clauses may forbid civil litigation, rightfully, but do not preclude responsibility for criminal acts. The supposed ambiguity that Jones’ rape cannot be considered a crime is to build a crock upon a sham. No contract may dictate that a assignee consents to be the victim of a crime. Sorry boys.

Likewise, the concept of Iraq being a lawless state is our Defense Department’s wet dream. We may administrate Iraq like the Wild West, as it may for now be under our screws, but like everywhere else on the globe, Iraq is protected by international law. You might also find lawyers who will argue that any lands under the authority of our government are bound by the US constitution period.

The only thing standing between the KBR miscreants and fair judgment is our government’s determination [not] to apply the law. If the media wanted to report that all Blackwater KBR killer rapists are indemnified exclusively by Bush decree, that would be the truth.

Thank you Miss Jones for pressing on with your accusations and lawsuit. Please don’t let the disinformation discourage you.

Climate Change -who benefits?

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Are “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” a rather convenient way for the large investment companies (now that they’re all jumping on the bandwagon) to step forward, in lock step with the Congress, and find the ways in which they can become the “players” in the unfolding “crisis” and have a new tax that will, of course as always, be a burden most on those who can least afford it?

Or are they really concerned about the planet? Was Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” more of an investment talk aimed at these owners of capital getting in on a carbon tax and trading scheme, rather than a real debate that gave time to the dissenting scientific view? And, is the dogma now that CO2 and greenhouse effect are really driving the race toward ownership of emerging large alternative energy companies in which the corporations will likely win? Calling CO2 a pollutant is deception. It is what trees and plants thrive on.

Ethanol has now become the new “savior” in our effort of curbing the import of foreign oil. But ethanol is net-energy. That is, it takes more energy to create it than it gives back, besides the agricultural mess it will lead us to. How is it in past earth warming cycles, man’s absence was a causation? Seemingly impossible. Is the Solar cycle part of a natural global warming process? Why aren’t we moving instead to form citizen owned solar and wind utilities that will help the vast majority to utilize these energies without the huge up front costs usually associated? Or unless implemented immediately and widely, would it be all for naught as the worlds energy needs will never be affected by alternative energies? In other words, how do you replace the 85 million barrels of oil a day the planet uses? Not to mention the tons of coal and millions of cubic feet of natural gas?

Gore’s 7 good foot soldiers steps to reduce Co2 “pollution” is almost Hitlarian. Don’t think, just do what I say …from a spineless politician who wouldn’t stand up (and told others not to) for an investigation into the 2000 stolen election.

Capitalism will overtake any real discussion of problems we face and destroy dissenters who offer up real solutions to energy use that are owned by the populace at large. And once they’ve taxed us for carbon they will figure out a way to tax the sun or wind for those who take advantage of it for their homes. Yes, reduce your use of oil, gas, coal, etc… but beware who really benefits from this mostly un-debated scare of global warming.

What do we get for behaving as they want us to? A cleaner world? But no monetary gain for us? If our government was really serious about this the tax incentives would come back as in the 70’s and much bigger this time. And in all states. But that would hurt the oil-energy companies.

Some interesting articles and comments for your consideration:

Denial
By Frank Furedi, Spiked Online

“The charge of denial has become a secular form of blasphemy … The heretic is condemned because he has dared to question an authority that must never be questioned. Here, ‘overwhelming evidence’ serves as the equivalent of revealed religious truth, and those who question ‘scientists of unquestioned reputation’ — that is, the new priestly caste — are guilty of blasphemy … ‘Denial’ has become part of a secular inquisition that stigmatizes free thinking.”

Preaching the Climate Catechism
By Lorne Gunter, National Post

“Since 2003, the upper layer of the Atlantic has lost 25% of the extra heat it had built up in the past three decades…The broad consensus among solar scientists is that the Earth’s warming is almost entirely explicable by increased solar activity that began about 100 years ago, and which will end around 2020…But these inconvenient truths would be bad for the cause…”

Lehman Brothers contemplate and study profitability of Climate Change

Austrailian carbon credit purchase. Who owns the wind farm in China? Not the citizens.

Is carbon tax a shelter for the rich?

Do you remember Pearl Harbor?

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December 7 is the day that lives on in infamy, when a Japanese naval force traveled across the Pacific unobserved by ships or planes, under the nose of our intelligence network, to catch the US fleet napping early one Sunday morning. Fortunately the newer more valuable American ships, including all our aircraft carriers, had quietly been sent on maneuvers.
Japanese attempt at SHOCK AND AWE, our permission slip to go to war

The sneaky nature of Japan’s attack, combined with her similar blitz on our colonial possessions in the Pacific, made War With Japan an easier sell to isolationist Americans who were redoubled in their resolve after the disaster of our unnecessary participation in WWI. It’s conjectured that FDR knew about the Attack on Pearl Harbor, but understood that only such infamy would prompt our public to cry for revenge.

Whether or whatever Roosevelt knew, he is blamed certainly for having given the Japanese no alternative but to attack. The US was asserting itself as lone strong man in the Pacific, with expansionist designs of its own, and had issued an ultimatum to Japan that we would brook no territorial ambitions of theirs. We’d already cut off Japan’s access to oil, American volunteers were already fighting Japan in China, and our bases stood in their way in the Philippines. America had assumed Spain’s stewardship responsibilities over the Philippines just as the Filipinos were about to seize their independence.

So Japan was goaded into trying to hobble our Pacific fleet, hoping to smack down our bullying tone. But they clobbered only our older ships and unwittingly unleashed an industrial giant, which our leaders knew, and they would learn, would prove unstoppable.

Is there life after SaveDarfur?

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Update: Retired UN ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi is interviewed on BBC the World: Elder statesmen seek Sudan progress.
Save Darfur from UN peacekeepers of Pax Americana.
If you can’t support the SAVE DARFUR call to arms, where does that leave you?

Is there no “grass roots” non-profit think-tank network supporting financial incentives to encourage benevolent stewardship on the part of the Sudanese government? (Maybe none flush with money.) Is there no one urging US and allies to quit arming those fighting the government forces so that China wouldn’t be called upon to resupply munitions to Khartoum?

That is whose fault?

Is there no congressional representative you can call to suggest legislation laying out diplomatic encouragement in lieu of divestiture and corporate maneuvers to snatch Sudan’s resources from the clutches of the Chinese?

That is whose fault?

Just because an alternative may be a little more complicated than can be explained beneath a compelling poster, is no excuse not to take the high road.

Just because your options are offered as the lesser of two evils: either approve UN peacekeepers or we will have to launch missile strikes, does not mean you have to choose either. Have you only Hillary or Obama to chose for presidential nominee? No you don’t. Would any other candidate stand a chance to be elected? Should you try and see?

Do not ask others to settle for your lack of imagination or stamina.

The end of America here come the thugs

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Naomi Wolf is touring the country to promote her bestselling horror book THE END OF AMERICA. In it she directs our attention to ten steps which have foreshadowed every open society’s descent to totalitarian rule. Rather than signs of nascent machinations, these form more of an inviolate blueprint. Recognize ALL of them?
      1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
      2. Create a gulag
      3. Develop a thug caste
      4. Set up an internal surveillance system
      5. Harass citizens’ groups
      6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
      7. Target key individuals
      8. Control the press
      9. Dissent equals treason
     10. Suspend the rule of law

Now we can see the checklist, applied by such would-be dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, etc. Every last one being implemented, under development, or next up in the USA.

I would always have had a hard time imagining Brownshirts in America, because I imagined the thug class to be made of thugs. Imagine however the American incarnation, an under-educated, highly-patriotic, methodological enforcer of the law, except imagine the law as perverted, inconsistent, irrational, counter intuitive to what citizens expect to be their protections. Not so bright agents of arbitrary rules. It’s all there, and we’re already seeing the signs, police killing subjects with non-leathal weapons, using excessive force, enforcing laws that are contradictions of contradictions of constitutional protections. That’s thuggery. That’s terror.

Commerce takes Visa or anti-Visa

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Life takes Visa not cashI love this commercial. Life Takes Visa. Life –or here its commerce equivalent– is a well choreographed bakery, a happy flow of patrons interrupted only by a hapless customer who bottlenecks the process by presuming to pay with cash. The scenario presages acceptance of the viewer/consumer’s role as willing cog, but it offers an important economics truism to those who would aspire to monkey-wrench such a dehumanized construct. What does it take to disrupt a well oiled machine? A trifle.

Ever wonder what would happen if a store’s customers all decided to shop the same day? We see it the day after Thanksgiving, but otherwise most of us distribute ourselves evenly across the calendar. It’s the market’s invisible hand and retail business models are fashioned accordingly. What happens when someone organizes a boycott, or otherwise interferes with the statistical flow? We can see it in this ad: Chaos and collapse. A boycott doesn’t have to convince a majority of consumers to curb their spending, it need only reach a number critical to upset the applecart. As management practices streamline labor efficiencies, even a small interruption in demand can wreak a disproportion of havoc.

It will not be for lack of a credit card (though certainly for lack of consumer credit!), but fliers or a picket line, can effect the balance sheet, most of all because the potential liabilities they pose cannot be predicted, and margins of profit cannot then be insured. The demise of your worst nightmare of a blood-sucking capitalist is but a garlic-breath away. You may be kept to feel by the corporate media that you are powerless to contravene, but here’s an ad they are too cynical to have censored. YOU can bring their machinations to a cathartic stop.

Darfur

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Darfur AID not sanctionsYesterday’s Colorado College rally (October 29) by the interventionist group, ‘Save Darfur’, was quite an educational event. There, we got to see a train load of comfortable American speakers demand that we begin an economic war against a Fourth World country, Sudan, to be carried out by US corporations and the US government.

How could anybody be against that, their puzzled faces questioned those few of us that were there with signs against the increasing US military presence in Africa? Don’t you want to help the people of Darfur? As a matter of fact, we do, and that is precisely why we oppose groups like ‘Save Darfur’. They do not advocate economic assistance to Africans, but rather they advocate ‘policing’ them and dominating them from Washington D.C.

Not a word was said about opposing AFICICOM, the new Pentagon intervenionist command center designed to terrorize Africa. Not a word was said about the US use of Ethiopian troops to invade Somalia and overthrow the government there. The Eritrean government is predicting an attack on their country backed by the US government since they opposed, and continue to oppose, US actions against the people of Somalia. Not a word was said against US military aggression in Africa at the rally.

The mention of the US genocide against the Iraqi people met a shout from the crowd to ‘stay on focus’ about Darfur. Nobody talked about the need to end the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the Pentagon. Nobody talked about the genocide of the Palestinians by the combined US and Israeli governments’ aggression. Not a word was said against the what is being done in Gaza and Lebanon, Pakistan and Iran by current US foreign policy. Not a word was said in opposition to the so called ‘War on Terror’, a made-in-the-US war that breeds terror, and celebrates terror and torture everywhere. Not a word was said against US government torture and rendition of POWs to be tortured by other countries.

Instead, we were exhorted by the speakers to begin a campaign to blame China for African bloodshed! This campaign is to be brought to bear on the Sudanese government and China from the countries that have terrorized Africans for centuries! Nobody in the pro interventionist rally crowd seemed to see anything much wrong with this? Instead they acted as if their actions were some how saintly and divine.

They talked about genocide a lot, though even Jimmy Carter has just declared most recently that the killings in Sudan do not meet the defintion of being a genocide. We agree. See the Christiian Science Monitor report ‘Elders’ criticize West’s response to situation in Darfur…Brahimi says West ‘pampered’ rebels, while Carter calls US’s use of term ‘genocide’ to describe violence ‘unhelpful.’ We too want to see the civil war and bloodshed in Sudan to come to an end, but do not agree with the activities of the group ‘Save Darfur’.

The US has spent at least $2.5 trillion in tearing apart Iraq and Afghanistan. We call on the US to spend that sort of money to end poverty, war, and disease in Africa. Why isn’t ‘Save Darfur’ doing the same? Instead they are calling for troops to be sent in, economic war to be begun against an impoverished country, and blame to be cast on the developing country of China. We find this to be shameful, and say that the Peace Movement should not put its stamp of approval on this campaign by the misnamed ‘Save Darfur’.

Peace Now. Spend the war budget on human needs. End the bloodshed by holding our own government responsible, instead of calling for it to increase its intervention into other countries’ affairs. We demand that the US start an economic aid package, without strings attached, that gives billions of dollars of reparations for the crimes that our government has done to Africans over several centuries. Forgive all of Africa’s foreign debt now. That’s how you help the people of Darfur, not by urging US power plays to control African resources.

Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission must demand no more US intervention into the affairs of other nations.

The Blame China pro US interventionists come to town today

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The group Save Darfur comes to town with their Blame China pro-US interventionist campaign today at Colorado College. This campaign is heavily backed by the Democratic Party and is designed to take the heat off the Democrats for backing Bush’s genocide against the Iraqi people. Many people unfortunately seem to be falling for the con.

It is disgraceful that the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission is also slipping this antiChinese campaign onto its list of events to promote. Why? The Chinese are about the last nation to be blaming for all the bloodshed that European colonialism backed up by US imperialism has brought to the African continent. Instead of concentrating on the misdeeds of our own American government, some in the PPJPC seem intent on promoting US interventionism into Africa instead.

Sure, the liberal interventionists take great pains to hide their true program. They say they are trying to save lives, not trying to push US military interventionism in Sudan. But that that is not so is clear by their entire lack of any campaign to get the US out of Africa. Instead, they play the US government blame game and encourage its campaign against China.

Shame on you Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission! If there was any sort of democratic discussion and decision making inside this organization, maybe a stop could be put to this local push for US interventionism? But the organization seems totally undemocratic in structure, and little is being done to change that despite so many promises to do so.

It is time for this organization decide whether they will continue to encourage doing pro intervention work in favor of greater US involvement into African affairs, or not. It is one thing if individual members on their own bring in their signs and banners For US Intervention, but quite another when the organization as a whole encourages participation as a whole in these pro US interventionist campaigns.

US Out of Africa Now! It’s time to reign in the US military and not to call for yet more aggression against foreign countries. It’s time for the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission to stop playing dumb on the issue of US interventionism into other countries’ affairs, even when the media says it is all for a good cause.

Rats to power!

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Forget Michael Moore. Forget all the other liberal/ Left movies out there, but go see Ratatouille. Rats to power!

The same director that directed the movie, The Incredibles, has made a movie where French rats once again come to power and overthrow elite snobbery and capitalistic trash to improve basic food consumption for the masses. Power to the rats, and rats to power!

The Soviet Union may have fallen, China is capitalist-roading it, but subversion is still alive. Maybe those rats that ‘infested’ that New York Taco Bell just a while back were merely trying to better the menu? Ratatouille!

Burma, Chevron, the US, and China

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Burma lies politically and geographically sandwiched between the 3 major encroaching powers of India, China, and the US. See India cuts to the chase in Myanmar

The country’s military rulers have tried to maintain some semblance of internal control over the national economy by brutally suppressing its own population, which is deeply divided along ethnic lines. All this began to fall apart when the regime was forced to more than double fuel prices this August, prices which had been previously held artificially lower than world world prices. Thus, the rebellion began.

In effect, the country is becoming yet another US-China battle line in the military and economic struggle for position to control world fuel sources. In the center smack dab, is Chevron, which owns the major source of fuel produced by the country Let’s hope that somewhere in all this international propaganda battle to place blame, that the Myanmar people themselves can gain control over their own country, and keep it independent of US, Chinese, and national military control.

Save Darfur from China getting their oil

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Demand Western Re-colonizationIt happened again at today’s peace day observance, somebody snuck a SAVE DARFUR .ORG banner into the International Peace Day signage. What part of Save Darfur from Muslim Encroachment on Western Exploitation don’t these White Man’s Burden throwbacks understand?

I’d rather tolerate freedom of diverse expression in making our public statements, but some of us agree to temper our indignity about Bush, why can’t others play ball? The immediate challenge: how to keep the Darfur war drums from infecting our otherwise peace-seeking message? The only thing the Darfur Meme has to do with Peace are the armed, imperialist peace-keepers the UN wants to send in to protect Sudanese oil and other Western investments from falling into the hands of the Chinese.

These are actual graphics from the SaveDarfur.org website! Above, they are soliciting online petition signatures to favor a militarized Western occupation, read re-colonial administration of the Sudan. Below, they are perfectly satisfied to have President Bush make the appeal to the UN to, hehe, send in the troops.

Save Darfur are Promise-Keepers and they want to speak through President Bush

The Save Darfur Coalition has made a promise to the Sudanese, apparently, in your name. Now they want you to help them keep YOUR PROMISE. What wankers!

Why I don’t like ‘Ike’

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Many in the Colorado Springs Justice and Peace Commission seem enamored with Eisenhower, and even wear caps with ‘I Like Ike’ on them, and carry banners highlighting his one speech supposedly warning about the Military-Industrial complex.

Far from warning us of the dangers of this beast though, Eisenhower brought the beast home to bite America big. I cannot bring myself to ‘like Ike’ as they seem to do.

One aspect of ‘Ike’ was how he was the master of the witch hunt. Most know that Joe McCarthy rose and fell during Eisenhower’s time in office, but too many believe that it was ‘Ike’ that stopped him, and deny that ‘Ike’ made the McCarthy Era happen. If you read the wikipedia info on McCarthy, one will even discover that Robert Kennedy was an employee of Joe McCarthy. The Kennedy’s were in bed with this sick maniac, and so was Eisenhower.

Eisenhower finally had to make some distance from McCarthy, but in no way did he distance himself from witch hunting, red baiting, and homo baiting. Similarly, he gave one speech supposedly distancing himself from the Military-Industrial complex, but his entire career was based on feeding that machine, and enlarging it. To hold this one speech by him high up as being an important and defining one is insane. Will one day some liberal folk focus on some speech by George Dubya talking about the need for compassionate conservatism and enshrine that speech in myth, too? Let’s hope not.

During ‘Ike”s presidency, the US almost started a nuclear bombing and invasion of China, and these years were the coldest of the Cold War. Put simply, I don’t like Ike and there is little reason for any even moderately liberal person in the US to like him either. It’s time to put in their graves these two mistaken J&P banners quoting Eisenhower on one, and Henry Ford on another. Henry Ford, too, was an American fascist thug of a previous era like Ike. It is sad to see proPeace activists carrying quotes from these two Right Wingers.

These two banners should be thrown in the garbage can and never again be used here in Colorado Springs. If not done soon, I think I will make up some banner quoting Joseph Stalin on the need for Peace (Yes, he certainly spoke to that many a time) and carry it side by side with the ‘Ike’ and Ford ones. Maybe then????? these nice pacifist liberals might get the message about how dismaying their choice of wording on these two banners really appears? Who knows?

Prison labor

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Chinese prisoners working a field
Chinese police confiscated this tourist’s camera when she happened upon a prison workforce out in the fields. Nothing wrong with putting convicts to work? Say you have fields in need of workers, and you have the authority to step up arrests… for arbitrarily enforced violations like substance abuse… at just the peak time of need, say, for planting season, or the harvest…

Gold in them thar hills

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Darfur has undiscovered water! Water you say? In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart discovered that no fortune in gold could buy what he really needed in the desert, water!

Precipitating a gold rush has been a traditional underhanded mechanism to conquer and settle new lands, for America’s westward expansion especially, at the tricky impasse of land already deeded to the Indians.

Facing troops and lawmakers showing a moral reluctance to annihilate his red-skinned foes, George Custer played up claims of gold in the Black Hills and the land grab was on, poor white opportunists scrambling to invade Indian lands without anyone being able, if they wanted, to stop them. The betrayed Sioux were all but goaded into war and were soon displaced.

Now someone’s rallying the carpetbaggers to mine the water of Sudan. True, the circumstances are more complex. It’s not our greed they’re preying upon, but our eagerness to see a humanitarian solution. It’s been all to easy to feel there’s nothing to be done to help the Sudan because Africa’s troubles appear perpetual. But with water of course salvation is at hand, even though it’s a panacea.

The march to drill wells in the Sudan may not seem to be for our immediate gain, but let’s not forget that the real fortunes made in gold discoveries weren’t made by miners, but by those who sold them the pick axes and shovels. The drive to Drill 1,000 Wells For Darfur will reap a lot of pick axes and shovels.

Plus we’ll need to protect those projects, to make sure the new water supplies don’t fall into the schemes of evil warlords, so we’ll be authorizing troops to protect, not the black people, but our wells. And amid the militarized destabilization, the west will be able to wrestle China for Sudan’s proven reserves, oil.

Is there water in Darfur? Of course there is. Is there a subterranean reservoir the size of Lake Erie? Five thousand years ago. Experts are skeptical as to what remains. Professor Farouk El-Baz’s previous water divinations in the 80’s yielded 350 wells drilled in Egypt, but no accounts mention finding a rush of water.