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Released British Sailors Tell of 'Torture'

BBC - Royal Navy personnel seized by Iran were made to sit all alone, arms to their sides, in rooms with the lights dimmed during their 13 days in captivity, the crew have said. They were lined up while weapons were cocked, making them "fear the worst," one of the 15 freed sailors revealed.

The crew were told that if they did not admit they were in Iranian waters when captured that they faced seven years in prison, a press conference heard.

Opposing their captors was "not an option," they said.

And after the 15 marines and sailors were seized they were subjected to random interrogation and rough handling, and faced constant psychological pressure, they said. "We were very frightened," said one. "They would not allow us to have our tea time."

The navy has already begun a review of the circumstances surrounding the incident.

Satire using a shortened, loosely re-written news article published in BBC News, Friday, April 6, 2007.

Labels: Satire

King: It's Now Beyond Vietnam

Forty years ago, on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a rarely broadcast speech at New York's Riverside Church. His speech, Beyond Vietnam is still powerful in its prophetic relevance to our contemporary situation—and to our relationship with "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

The Decline of Democracy

This is why the so-called two-party system in the US is going to be the death of the American democratic republic:

Two paragraphs later is this bizarre commentary: "Obama has made his opposition to the war a centerpiece of his campaign and has used it to differentiate himself from rival Democratic Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq."

1.  "Congress will fund Iraq war if Bush uses veto, Obama says" in AP/USA Today, April 1, 2007. And, no, this isn't an April Fool's gag.

Hey! Hey!

As I was riding my bike around Ormond Beach today, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. At first, since I'd heard it so often, I didn't pay much attention to it : Someone honked a horn because the car in front of them was taking too long to move after the light turned green. A few minutes and a few blocks later, I heard another horn honk: this time it was friends honking at other friends to get their attention. That reminded me of Gary Larsen's Far Side cartoon about the man who invents a dog-speech translator helmet. As he walks down the street with his translating helmet on his head, all the dogs barking at him say (in translation) Hey! ... Hey! ... Hey! ... and so forth. Well, I think it's funny.

I also think an entrepreneur could take that and run with it. I mean, the car horn is kind of like the dog's bark. One sound is meant to do duty for many things—watch out, hurry up, hello, etc. Instead of the plain horn, like the bark of a dog, we could have real speech. Rather than having to honk at the person in front of you, you could have a loud speaker and a microphone and say whatever you want.

I suppose you could also just stick your head out of the window and shout "Hey!"—but I think that's why we have car horns in the first place.