Blogging the democratic revolution
Thandar Shwe marries Zaw Phyo Win in “Myanmar” Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News Now here’s a story that was given the proper treatment by Reuters! Burmese tinpot general and military junta leader Than Shwe put on a big lavish wedding for his daughter Thandar Shwe, with tiaras of diamonds, cascades of champagne, and a five-tier wedding cake. A video of it accidentally got out and it was more money on parade than anyone had seen in a long time in Burma. Classy Burmese, however impoverished, noted to Reuters that it was pretty darn vulgar, what with the yellow diamonds and…
Violence in Oaxaca, on Tuesday Source: Agencia EFE Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez’s fingerprints are all over the leftist violence and insurrection going on in Oaxaca, Mexico right now. That’s not my conjecture but what’s running in the mainstream Mexican press. Like here. The past weekend, President Vicente Fox sent in the troops to the troubled region, where Zapatista ‘Otra Campagna’ far-leftists are battling PRI dinosaur leftists. It began as a teachers’ strike for higher wages but now has turned into a full blown insurrection, with neither group willing to give an inch. President Vicente Fox (of the center-right PAN party)…
The Taliban’s barbaric destruction of the centuries’ old Bamiyan Buddhas Source: Vers un Sens de la Vie Remember the 2001 brazen destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas? Right in front of the world’s face, the filthy, foul Taliban, led by the mascara-loving Mullah Omar, smashed this irretrievable masterpiece of human hands, an ancient artwork that inspired human minds throughout centuries, and then he vilely claimed it was all ‘sinful.’ So 1,000 years of culture, of art, of devotion, of miraculous expertise, a great window on the mysterious minds of our ancestors, was destroyed by this maggot, using western explosives to achieve…
Isn’t there a leftwing site somewhere that devotes itself to watching Fox News “so you don’t have to”? I think there is, and it’s an entertaining thing. Venezuela has its own TV-watcher, doing yeoman’s work, watching the Chavistas in action on the television – our own dear Daniel Duquenal of Venezuela News & Views. Daniel takes us through the latest Chavista television appearance on privately owned Globovision and entertains us with the Chavista performance of one Chavista operative named Calixto Ortega, trying to make sense of the world on that independent medium. Daniel advises us that Chavistas only go on…
Alek Boyd has been doing some fantastic reporting on the state of poor society in Venezuela, actually talking to people and seeing what it’s like in their often ignored world. Are you aware that Venezuela’s poor are poorer than any other western hemispheric nation’s poor? I mean places like Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil and Bolivia? I sure wasn’t. But apparently, it’s true. And it’s not surprising. Take a huge oil economy that drives out all other trade. Couple it with unchecked illegal immigration, rendering millions of people without legal papers. Add onto it layers of socialism which preceded Chavez, which taxes…
The U.S. government launched a federal probe of Smartmatic, the Venezuelan voting machine company affiliated with the Venezuelan government, whose machines were instrumental in all the electoral fraud committed in Venezuela since 2004. The company claims the probe, first broke by the Miami Herald on Saturday, was all their idea but ahead of U.S. elections, under unfavorable media spotlight, I do not believe them at all. Following its role in the recall referendum that entrenched Hugo Chavez in power, the company has since taken its kooka-profits (in the neighborhood of $120 million) from the crime against democracy, and bought up…