In case you needed to know whose side the UN is on...

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/ph...4de0eefdc89ae5/

This is a Yahoo News hosted AP photograph, so it is not likely to last very long before the link goes dead.

Anyway, the UN "peacekeepers" are shown here saluting the coffins of Hezbollah and Palestinian fighters. Photographed on the placard is the dead Hezbollah leader, Imad Mughniyeh, mastermind of the barracks bombing at the Beirut International Airport in 1983, which killed 241 Marines and 58 French servicemen as well as a handful of civilians. Hezbollah is not the Lebanese military, it is a terrorist group merely operating within Lebanon and beyond the control of the government., so these dead terrorists are not requiring of gushing admiration and respect from international "peacekeeping" forces.

Monumental Incompetence

At a French army barracks open day on Sunday, a soldier in a hostage rescue demonstration loaded his gun with live rounds instead of blanks and managed to shoot seventeen people, including five children. Only two were other servicemen. Fortunately there have been no reports of fatalities. This is puzzling because live rounds give a recoil when fired which is not felt when firing blanks, as only a small mass of gas and not a bullet is ejected out of the barrel in the latter case.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7480483.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7481982.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7483159.stm

Clock is wrong.

The forum clock has been wrong for several days now. It is about an hour and twelve minutes slow.

UN Human Rights Council passes resolution condemning freedom of speech.

Guess which quarter this comes from? You guessed it: Muslims.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/01/...Free-Speech.php

The article was published April 1st, so I had to check the Human Rights Council's website myself to make sure it was true. Sure enough, it is the nineteenth resolution adopted at the organizations recent seventh assembly.

Go here:

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcou...ssion/index.htm

And download the first draft document containing resolutions. It is number 19, and is quite difficult to find because there are no page numbers listed in the contents.

This comes after Ban Ki Moon himself took the effort to express support for the Dutch government's attempts to block the viewing of the recent anti-Islamic film Fitna (even though he has probably never seen it himself). Fitna is merely a collage of excerpts of Islamists talking themselves in relation to several issues and acts of Islamic terrorism all interspersed with surae and ahadith from Islam's own texts. You can find a thousand such videos about Christianity on YouTube and they are completely without controversy. Anyone may denounce anything critical of Islam as "hate speech" without any rational supporting argument. It seems that the only reason need be that it is often accurate.

The resolution demonstrates what a joke the UN really is. It is nothing but a talking shop, and those who most enthusiastically participate are completely opposed to the claimed principles under which it was founded. You will notice that the article mentions that Europeans abstained from voting. The next time that someone mentions that Israel is in violation of tens of UN general assembly resolutions, you just need show them this and tell them that the same principles are in play: it is merely Arab and Muslim countries and a few enablers voting on their own pet issues.

Doing Something

Lots of people have an interest in politics and their views on any particular issue usually fall upon one of two sides. One's views on a particular issue quite often will be a good indicator of one's stance on issues that do not seem directly related. This usually puts people in one of two competing sides, if not because of a uniform agreement across all issues, then because of an agreement in those viewed to be most signicant. This being the case, what each side strives for as a 'positive' outcome in the progress of society is to see their opponents defeated and in misery--within the limits of each nation's constitution--for as long as the victor retains the upper hand in government. Even if it is not strictly true that this is how everyone thinks--some certainly do--its functional equivalent is in place. Therefore, it is difficult to see that the preservation of democracy is a sufficient condition for acheiving real progress. Although it is a necessary one, as a defense against despotism.

But is each side all that different in their goals? We all want less crime, less war, less unwanted pregnancy, less drug addiction, less disease, less poverty, greater literacy and numeracy, greater access to medicine, etcetera, except in cases that people have a vested interest where, in order to improve their own circumstances, they permit themselves to compromise on one or more of these goals, or in other cases where people are so misanthropic that they do not desire these things. In the present system, therefore, it is more important to argue about methods of solution than it is to solve problems, with each side proclaiming that some contentious course of action is the best way to deal with a particular problem, according to their own political predilections or vested interests.

So then, it is perhaps better in many cases, no matter how minor, to discover some uncontentious means of solution to a problem rather than simply to go with the humdrum of one side being satisfied by some means of government action, or inaction, and the other being utterly dismayed. There is always an endless supply of people dedicating themselves to the status quo of putting their own side one up on the other, why would you be compelled to join them?