The Lasso of Truth

F those buggers

See the movie they did not want you to see. 

When I first got notice of the showing in Ottawa, I was super-disappointed that it was physically impossible for me to go.  If it had been scheduled for a weekend, I probably would have made the 6 hour drive to Ottawa for it.  Sadly, kids and work prevented it.

Lucky for me, the thugish stunts of the chumps at the Iranian embassy and their cro magnon compatriots have made it possible for me and many others to view it free over the internet, without the constraints of distance and schedule!  Thanks guys!

Snow Day!

It took me an hour and a half to drive the 20kms to work this morning.  My ass hurts, my temper is frayed and I have a slew of work to catch up on...but this still made me laugh this morning:

The term "backward" just doesn't seem adequate

After all, she can be forced to marry at the age of 14 but she's too young to stone to death until she's 18.

And don't even get me started on how a gal can have an adulterous affair on her husband after he's already dead...

Ms Ashtiani was sentenced in 2006 for having an "illicit relationship" with two men, for which she has already received a public flogging of 99 lashes. She was convicted of adultery even though she was a widow at the time -- her husband was killed before the alleged affair started.

Her family claims that during the trial of the two men accused of murdering her husband, another court found her guilty of adultery with the suspects, even though no evidence was given.

These people want nukes.  Just remember that.

GASP! Aggressive sanctions?!

They're shaking in their boots, no doubt...

Obama, who had made the goal of pursuing dialogue with Iran a cornerstone of his administration's foreign policy at the beginning of his presidency, said he had been successful in getting the international community to isolate Tehran.

"As we've seen, the Iranian government has been more concerned about preventing their people from exercising their democratic and human rights than trying to solve this problem diplomatically," Obama said in an interview on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Bret Baier.

"That's why we're going to go after aggressive sanctions. We haven't taken any options off the table. We are going to keep on pushing," Obama said.

Keep on pushing...right off the cliff.

Priorities

Where state policy requires the utilization of the "DELETE" key, not "SEND"...

The head of Iran's soccer federation issued a public apology and a member of his staff resigned after the federation mistakenly sent a New Year's greeting to its counterpart in Israel, Iranian officials announced Sunday. [..]

Kaffashian said Iran's soccer league routinely sends New Year's greetings to all members of FIFA, the sport's global federation, except for Israel. Iran does not recognize Israel, which it dismisses as the "Zionist entity," and the two countries' teams do not meet in international competitions.

You'd think with riots in the streets and a nuclear armament program ramping up, they'd have more important things to care about than who a low-level sports bureaucrat sent an e-card to.

But who let him speak, anyway?

It's nice to see my country grow a pair, for a change...

Diplomats from Canada, the United States and many other countries walked out of United Nations General Assembly Wednesday to protest a blistering speech by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that included scathing verbal attacks on Israel and the West.

"There is no way I am going to permit any official of the government of Canada to be present and give any legitimacy to remarks by a leader like that," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said earlier in Oakville, Ont.

[..]

He said Canada believes Ahmadinejad's abuse of human rights, detention of innocent people and "disgraceful, insulting" declarations about Israel and the Holocaust should be protested.

"President Ahmadinejad has said things, particularly about the state of Israel, the Jewish people and the Holocaust, that are absolutely repugnant," Harper said.

"It is unfitting that somebody like that would be giving those kinds of remarks before the United Nations General Assembly. . . .

"There are times when things are being said in this world that it is important that countries that have a moral compass stand up, make their views known and our absence there will speak volumes about how Canada feels about the declarations of President Ahmadinejad."

Loopholes

Who would have thought the Iranians had so much respect for the rule of law..?

The anonymous militiaman, exposing a part of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, told The Jerusalem Post that at age 18 he was "given the honor to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death".

In the Islamic Republic of Iran it is illegal to execute a woman if she is a virgin, the former guard said.

So the Government arranges "wedding" ceremonies to be conducted the night before executions, and prisoners are forced to have sexual intercourse with a guard

I guess they don't want convicted criminals joining the ranks of the 72 virgins promised to martyrs, in heaven.  It's good to have standards, I guess.

I've never been a numbers person...

Just ask my grade 9 math teacher who, once she managed to drag me from my second period squatting spot in the cafeteria, forced me to repeat the course.

As such, I have no idea what these people are talking about...but it sounds interesting nonetheless...

In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results?

Much, it would seem.

I'm fine with just assuming that any information coming from Iranian officialdom is false or custom-tailored to meet their own ends.  The head-cracking in the streets leaves me in little doubt as to how much the Iranian government values the principles of democracy.

It's all about perspective

But if your motivation is to suck up to an oppressive religious dictatorship, rather than show common cause with a struggle for democracy, I'm sure it was very good...

Unlike most of my comrades in the Zionist-neocon plot to take over the world, I did not think the Obamic statement on Iran was good. I didn’t even think it was good enough. Not good enough for our “international community” president to invoke the international community, again, speaking of “tired strategies”--or is that a tactic?--and wave its outrage like a white handkerchief at the Iranian regime; not good enough to deplore the “threats, the beatings and imprisonments,” as though they’ve been taking place in the vacuum “of the last few days” rather than playing out over the last few decades; not good enough to look at scenes of mayhem and murder and say, “The Iranian people are trying to have a debate about their future.”

Iran and the illusion of democracy

An election is about choice and this revolution in Iran is about the perception that choice was denied by nefarious vote-rigging.

But as much as I’d love to see Ahmadinejad get tossed from the highest building, the “choice” that was supposedly denied in Iran, was one of another candidate who still made it through the religious vetting process of the Mullahs.

It’s not democracy when they stack the ticket from the outset, so it cannot be democracy denied when they rig the result.

I feel for the unfortunate souls getting their heads cracked in the streets of Iran, but this fight is on the wrong front if what they truly want is a free and democratic process.  If you’re going to get shot in the street, it might as well be to overturn the entire system – not just for the sake of a recount in the current corrupt one.

Mousavi is the Obama of Iran

Oh really..?

We [Iranians] are a bit unfortunate. When we had our Obama [meaning President Khatami], that was the time of President Bush in the United States. Now that [the United States] has Obama, we have our Bush here [in Iran]. In order to resolve the problems between the two countries, we should have two Obamas on the two sides. It doesn't mean that everything depends on these two people, but this is one of the main factors.

Well, how do you like your Obama now..?

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with -- which inevitably confers legitimacy upon -- leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of "some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Where to begin? "Supreme Leader"? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts -- a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Tiananmen Redux?

An ominous warning from an Iranian with an ear to the ground:

Khamenei just finished his freaking sermon with saying that he's willing to give his life to defend the regime and Islam. I think this game just got a whole lot uglier. [..] I think he's ordered the regime's security forces to unleash its power against the protesters. Massacre awaits the Iranian people...

The most revealing part of this report...

...is the EDITOR'S NOTE:

Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.

So they say, without the slightest hint of alarm or condemnation.

If this had been the US election in, say, Florida 2000, do you think they'd be accepting media restrictions so casually?

INCOMPETENCE: THEY HAZ IT

Maybe this is what Obama meant when he called for "more dialog" with Iran, on nuclear proliferations...

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.

Or maybe he's just providing a shopping list for those "Muslim roots" of his.

Maybe they just want it for "power generation"

hmmm...and how could this be bad for us..?

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran's nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.