Interesting reading ...

I've been away for awhile, pretty much like everyone else around here. I got a call from my local Barnes & Noble bookstore last week informing me that they had some massive book in stock called "The Greyminster Chronicles". Remembering that I'd ordered it in a drunken haze, I went and got it. With my current schedule I should actually get around to reading it within the next decade.

"If you lie down with Nazis, you get up with fleas."

Just alerting the ROTW reader to a little known (even in Oz) Australian senator. Both Enoch Powell and Joe McCarthy would mighty proud to call this lad a son. HERE and HERE.

Tone's moral high horse destined for the knackery.

"There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death."

"So what of Tony Blair, the man who claims that human rights are so important that they justify going to war? Well, at the beginning of this year, he granted Uzbekistan an open licence to import whatever weapons from the United Kingdom Mr Karimov fancies. But his support goes far beyond that. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has repeatedly criticised Karimov's crushing of democracy movements and his use of torture to silence his opponents. Like Roger Casement, the foreign office envoy who exposed the atrocities in the Congo a century ago, Murray has been sending home dossiers which could scarcely fail to move anyone who cares about human rights."

Blair has been moved all right: moved to do everything he could to silence our ambassador. Mr Murray has been threatened with the sack, investigated for a series of plainly trumped-up charges and persecuted so relentlessly by his superiors that he had to spend some time, like many of Karimov's critics, in a psychiatric ward, though in this case for sound clinical reasons. This pressure, according to a senior government source, was partly "exercised on the orders of No 10".

MORE ... Tony Blair's new friend: "Britain and the US claim a moral mandate - and back a dictator who boils victims to death "

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The ghosts of Ari Fleischer and Alistair Campbell come back to haunt inform Tricky Dicky Haliburton.

This On The Queries Log

beautification of mother theresa
Mother Theresa beautification

Sorry Peeps. There ain't enough anti-wrinkle cream in the world that could have helped her!!

May you die in interesting times

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the widow of the Nationalist Chinese president who used her charm and fluent English to lobby Washington and become a driving force in Taiwan's Nationalist government, died Thursday in New York. She was 106.

Hot on the heels of the bat out of hell beautification of Mother Theresa, Pope JP11 is fast-tracking the beatification of Madame Two Serves of Number 53 and 1 Serve of Number 57 Kai-shreck in his race to enter to the Guiness Book of Records as the most sanctifying pontiff in history. Recently there have been mutterings from Vatican observers about the illicit use of beatification enhancing substances by JP11. Eyebrows were raised when his Pontification announced #3,204,524, St. Eroids. (O.K. I know I'll go to hell for that one. Fair cop! I offer no defence.)

And in other news. William and Harry : "Our mother would be mortified of she were still alive." ... errrr?

Just visiting...

In a shock revelation from his new book, "I Was Diana's Rock!" Paul "My-Flower-Shop-Has-Gone-Bust" Burrell has admitted that the late and now slightly mouldy Princess Diana (God rest her saintly mangled limbs) knew that she was going to die in advance.
Writes busty Burrell (22), "She gave this letter to me on her usual fish-oil laced notepaper, explaining all about how that bigoted old Greek shit, the Duke of Edinburgh, didn't like her simpering daigo boyfriend and how he was going to tamper with the brakes on her limo. That's why she went to Paris and got drunk and then drove through the underpass at 120 miles an hour...just to make sure they were working."
In recent years Paul "I'll-Never-Reveal-The-Princesses-Secrets" Burrell has fallen on hard times following the fall-off of interest in his former sex-mistress by American television audiences. Next week he's planning to climb inside a perspex box suspended from a crane above the River Mersey wearing nothing but a pair of Prince Charles' knickers for Children-in-Need.
"The Queen Mum, God rest 'er teeth, knew she was going to snuff it as well," Burrell continued as he entered the doors of the Halifax with his sack full of coffers. "She'd been saying for centuries that it was only a matter of time."
Unfortunately the rest of the world could no longer give a shit. In an interview given to the ROTW last week, Mohammed Al Fayed remarked, "Just so long as both of the greedy old bitches are dead then I'm happy."

Other news and ROTW ex-editor Brian "He's a God in his own right" Hughes is rumoured to be making a brief return visit to his old Blogger Board haunt before heading off for a shin dig with Dr David Kelly at The Fisherman's Arms. The rumours are, unfortunately, substantiated.

Onward Christian soldiers

'Holy war' general denies being anti-Islamic

A senior Pentagon intelligence official, under fire for his comments about Islam, has defended his statements and apologised to anyone offended by his statements.

"I am neither a zealot nor an extremist," US Army Lieutenant General William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence and war-fighting support, said in his first official statement.

"I am not anti-Islam or any other religion."

General Boykin tried to explain recent comments he made at churches and prayer breakfasts portraying the US battle with Islamic radicals as a clash with Satan.

In one case he referred to a Muslim fighter in Somalia and said that "my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday declined to criticise Boykin's remarks and praised the three-star general's military record, while General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not think General Boykin had broken any rules.

US television network NBC this week broadcast videotapes of the general, an evangelical Christian, giving speeches while wearing his Army uniform at Christian functions around the country.

"I would not expect him to engage in those sorts of speaking engagements in the future," a defence official said.

Last year General Boykin said: 'We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this.' He has also said of President George Bush: 'He's in the White House because God put him there.'"


"And you never ask questions
When God's on your side."