The United States of Europe (part 2)

Today the Times of Malta published an excellent letter by Jean Govè (of Sintezi) about the reaction to the Lisbon Treaty referendum result. Check it out.


Read also: The United States of Europe (part 1)

Beds and blowjobs

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary being vulgar and sexist.

Only men use business class, right?

Victim describes himself in Hi5 as having nocturnal sadistic tendencies

A guy got stabbed a gazillion times by a jealous husband and survived. Lo and behold the latest development in the court case: the victim's Hi5 profile quotes a heavy metal song!

CRUCIFY HIM!
CRUCIFY HIM!
CRUCIFY HIM!

The title of this blog post appeared in (VERDANA FONT SIZE 72) today's Times of Malta newspaper.

The article also states there's a photo of a heavy metal album cover depicting a satanic symbol in the vitim's Hi5 photo gallery.

CRUCIFY HIM!
CRUCIFY HIM!
CRUCIFY HIM!

Tell you what, here are a few quotes from songs I like which you can use against me in court if somebody ever goes medieval on my ass:

"And my dick runs deep,
so deep, so deep - put her ass to sleep."
Ice-Cube (It was a good day)

"I’ve got something to say,
I raped your mother today."
Metallica (Last caress)

"I got blood on my hands,
but there's no remorse.
And got blood on my dick,
'cause I fucked the corpse."
DMX (Bring your whole crew)

I'd love to hear defense lawyer Gianella Caruana Curran quote the above in a courtroom.


Read about the West Memphis 3.

Artemisia Gentileschi

In 1612, despite her early talent, Artemisia was denied access to the all-male professional academies for art. Therefore, her father hired the Tuscan painter Agostino Tassi to tutor Artemisia privately. During this tutelage, Tassi raped Artemisia and was reported to the authorities.

During the trial Artemisia was tortured using a device made of thongs wrapped around the fingers and tightened by degrees — a particularly cruel torture to a painter. This was done to corroborate the truth of her allegation, due to the belief that if a person can tell the same story under torture as without it, the story must be true.

Her next painting, Judith beheading Holofernes:


...has been interpreted as a wish for psychological revenge for the violence she suffered.

From Wikipedia.

Wages vis-a-vis Productivity

Yesterday on Bondiplus, Joseph Farrugia of the Malta Employers Association said you cannot expect wages to rise just because the prices of food and oil are rising at rates never seen before; employees have to be paid solely according to their productivity.

He's absolutely right of course.

However, employees are NOT paid according to their productivity in Malta. As a result every minute increase in prices is felt twofold or threefold by the employee. Therefore, whereas employers obviously cannot be blamed for the rising costs, they have to shoulder some of the blame for Malta having such a high cost of living, which makes it so goddamn hard for employees to make ends meet now, let alone next year when oil will cost $250 per barrel.


Read also Chaaarge!

Hasna, female suicide bomber

From TIME.


No one remembers Hasna Maryi ever opening her family's Koran. She rarely attended her village mosque and told others she regarded the Imam there as a lech. So it was not religious extremism that made this villager from Anbar province blow herself up at an Iraqi police checkpoint last summer.

...[Her brother] Thamer volunteered for his own suicide mission in early 2007 ...On a February morning Thamer was being driven to the Kilometer 5 security checkpoint by some fellow jihadis when one of their belts exploded prematurely, killing everyone in the car.

...Hasna was distraught — not because her brother was dead, but because he had not completed his mission. ...It wasn't long before she concluded that the only way to redeem her brother was to complete his mission. ...Soon after, Hasna approached her brother's former colleagues with a proposal. If they could get her a belt, she would bomb Kilometer 5 herself.


On the morning she blew herself up last July, there were 40 policemen on duty at the checkpoint. ...As [Hasna] drew close to the blast walls of the checkpoint, she seemed to trip over her abaya and fall. According to eyewitnesses, the woman called out to the nearest policemen, "Come and help me up, I’m hurt." When two policemen approached, the woman reached into her tunic and pulled the trigger on her bomb belt, instantly killing the two cops and fatally injuring a third. A huge fireball slammed into a car parked at the checkpoint, and the five civilians inside were badly burned.

...video shot by one of the men who drove her to the checkpoint, shows Hasna looking impassively out of the window until they approach Kilometer 5. Then she pulls a veil over her face and adjusts the belt around her waist before stepping out. One of the men in the car whispers, "God is great!" She doesn't respond or look back. As the car drives away, the video, shot through the rear window, shows her approaching the checkpoint. She is quickly obscured from view by the dust trail behind the car. Nearly a minute later there's a flash, a muffled boom and a column of black smoke. "God is great!" says the cameraman. "The stupid woman did it."

______________________________________________________________________

Killing and dying for a holy war you don't believe in - stupid indeed.

Tsvangirai pulls out

Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has withdrawn from the June 27th presidential election run-off because he believed it was impossible to have a fair election and also did not want people to die by voting for him.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has accused Mugabe’s government of preventing free and fair elections and called for an end to "violence and intimidation".

Tsvangirai beaten to a pulp when in police custody - March 2007
Tsvangirai is begging the world to intervene to halt Mugabe's dictatorship.

British officials called this "electoral terrorism".
US officials have called the Mugabe government "criminal".

But they won't do a damn thing about it as there's no oil in Zimbabwe. They already get coal, nickel, iron, gold, platinum, and diamonds at a good price from Mugabe so why intervene?

The United States of Europe (part 1)

The EU is throwing democracy out the window.

Nigel Farage is a great man.

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Playing both sides

The Ramblers’ Association of Malta said today it found it "unbelievable and disquieting" that the Prime Minister has “secretly consented to sanction the illegal occupation of public land at Armier" in what it said was a pre-election gimmick.

[Gonzi posing with Armier squatters
- scanned from MaltaToday]
"To add insult to injury, Enemalta is now proposing to build a substation estimated at €82,000 so that these illegal settlements can be better-served." [from timesofmalta]

[Gonzi at a Rambler's walk
- image from ramblersassociation]

Chaaarge!

Lawrence of Malta confirms that an increase in the power surcharge is inevitable.

This news comes 2 days after we were told Malta's inflation in May was at a high 4.1 per cent and 2 weeks after we found out food prices in April rose by 9.7 per cent when compared to a year earlier.

Housing still costs as much as it does in Tinseltown.
Wages are still similar to those in Uzbekistan.

Can we stop acting like things are swell when they obviously aren't?
This country is in the shitter. Yes, it is.


Read also Standard of Living in Malta and Relative Cost of Living.

Liberal Hypocrites

How can you call yourself a liberal or a libertarian and then put down liberal parties whenever the opportunity comes up?

How can you call yourself a liberal or a libertarian and be a staunch supporter of an ultra-conservative party?

Can't people see through this kind of bullshit?

JPO on BondiPlus

Watch JPO squirm.


[from di-ve.com]

Bush and McCain

Betcha can't tell them apart.

Cancer doctors dodge the death talk

[Excerpts from CNN]

Eileen Mulligan's doctor told her upfront that there are no good treatment options left to try for her cancer. He began gently. The chemotherapy is not helping. The cancer is advanced. There are no good options left to try. It would be good to look into hospice care. "At first I was really shocked. But after, I thought it was a really good way of handling a situation like that," said Mulligan, who now is making a "bucket list" -- things to do before she dies. Top priority: getting her busy sons to come for a weekend at her Washington, D.C., home.

Many people do not get such straight talk from doctors, who often think they are doing patients a favor by keeping hope alive. New research shows they are wrong.

Surprisingly, patients who had these talks were no more likely to become depressed than those who did not, the study found. They were less likely to spend their final days in hospitals, tethered to machines. They avoided costly, futile care. And their loved ones were more at peace after they died.

"Boiled down, it's 'Talking about dying will kill you,' " she said. In reality, "people crave these conversations, because without a full and candid discussion of what they're up against and what their options are, they feel abandoned and forlorn, as though they have to face this alone. No one is willing to talk about it."

...those who had end-of-life talks were three times less likely to spend their final week in intensive care, four times less likely to be on breathing machines, and six times less likely to be resuscitated.

Feeling nervous or worried was no more common among those who had end-of-life talks than those who did not.

From an ethics point of view, "it's easy -- patients ought to know," said Dr. Anthony Lee Back of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

People react differently, though, said Dr. James Vredenburgh, a brain tumor specialist at Duke University. "There are patients who want to talk about death and dying when I first meet them, before I ever treat them. There's other people who never will talk about it," he said. "Most patients know in their heart" that the situation is grim, "but people have an amazing capacity to deny or just keep fighting. For a majority of patients it's a relief to know and to just be able to talk about it," he said.

James Rogers, 67 of Durham, North Carolina, wants no such regrets. Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer last October, he had only one question for the doctor who recommended treatment. "I said 'Can you get rid of it?' She said 'no,' " and he decided to simply enjoy his final days with the help of the hospice staff at Duke. "I like being told what my health condition is. I don't like beating around the bush," he said. "We all have to die. I've had a very good life. Death is not something that was fearful to me."

MLP deputy leaders

[scanned from MaltaToday]
Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela have been elected deputy leaders for the Malta Labour Party.

First MLP had a horrible leader and two decent deputy leaders.

Now MLP has a decent leader and two horrible deputy leaders.

Can't they ever get it right?

I've got nothing against Toni Abela but I can't see him winning any votes from the younger crowd. Gavin Gulia would have been a big step in the right direction.

I thought the delegates chose Joseph Muscat as leader because he couldn't be linked to the terrible years of Mintoff and KMB. If so, why did the same people elect Anglu Farrugia?

Now Muscat will have to start preparing a MuscatMLP strategy i.e. hide these guys when he's in public.

How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

[Excerpt from CNN]

Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, California:

Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest. And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr.

Of platypi and men

This could have been our Prime Minister.
Nationalist columnists have been speaking damagingly of Joseph Muscat since the day he announced his run for MLP leadership. Their popularity makes them think there are legions of people who agree with everything they say. Well, everybody in the USA listens to what Howard Stern has to say, so there.

Would these columnists have preferred Marie-Louise Coleiro to lead MLP? Most definitely not. They picked on Muscat simply because they knew chances were he was going to win. Why not denigrate the MLP leader before he is even made leader? They are staunch nationalist supporters so such behaviour is to be expected of them.

Did they honestly want George Abela to win? Yes. Then again, come election time, they'd remember he was a prominent member of the General Workers Union during the Mintoff/KMB years and find a way to use it against him.

Elections aren't won solely over charisma, but it is an important factor, and was a deciding factor last March. Is Joseph Muscat more charismatic than Alfred Sant? Yes, so is a platypus. Does Muscat have a greater chance of winning the 2013 elections than Sant? Yes, so does a platypus. Yet Alfred "the guy even labourites now hate" Sant was only 1500 votes shy of winning the elections three months ago. Therefore, it follows that a platypus leading MLP would have won.

Let's face it, PM Gonzi, a dead ringer for F. Murray Abraham (Salieri in Amadeus for the uninitiated), doesn't overflow with charisma. The nationalists didn't come up with the idea of GonziPN because Gonzi is a great leader, but to constantly draw a comparison with Alfred Sant who was a well-known liability to MLP i.e. Gonzi looked good compared to Fredu - who wouldn't? Do people look at Gonzi and see a born leader? He had bad competition on all fronts, and almost lost - surely not a good result for his first time leading the party through general elections.

Now Gonzi's competition got better. Couple that with the fact that Muscat can't look that bad in our eyes for the time being because he's replacing a sub-platypus and the competition gets even stronger just because. Check out Lou Bondi's child-like excitement for having an MLP leader who answers questions posed to him (WOW!) on his show to know what I'm saying. Anyone would look good after Fredu.

Muscat isn't as easy a target for denigration as Sant, which explains the extra effort put in by nationalist columnists. We'll wait and see how it plays out.

What about George?

George Abela got 291 votes out of 865. In other words, 33.6% of the Labour Party delegates who voted wanted someone who hasn't been a part of Labour for a decade to become their new leader.

The least Joseph Muscat could do for all those delegates is offer this man an important post within MLP. Will he? Or will he offer Abela a token position with which Abela won't be able to rock the boat?


It is easy to speak about unifying MLP. It is easy to have your picture taken while you hug those who didn't back your leadership campaign.

But actually unifying the party won't be easy, especially when Muscat's friends within the party don't want this to happen. Joe Debono Grech knows this and resigned, even though he was the prime candidate to take over Joseph Muscat's MEP seat. [That would have been scary]

If Muscat fails at uniting his party, the people won't trust him to run the country.