My Archives: July 2005

Thursday, July 28, 2005

W O N D E R F U L   I S L A M

IRAN: Activists condemn execution of gay teens

   

ANKARA, 25 Jul 2005 (IRIN) - Human rights groups the world over have strongly condemned the recent execution of two gay teenagers in northeastern Iran.

"It's entirely unacceptable that people are actually killed because of their sexuality," Kursad Kahramananoglu, head of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), the oldest and only membership-based lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) organisation in the world, maintained from Istanbul.

While exact details of the case remained unclear, he vowed if confirmed, ILGA would pursue the matter to the highest level, including the United Nations, noting a rise in homophobia in the world today.

Kahramananoglu was not alone in his condemnation. "Killing teenagers for what they do together is absolutely abhorrent," David Allison, spokesman for the London-based LGBT advocacy group Outrage said. He added that given that Iran was such an old civilisation, it was appalling that they should descend to such barbaric levels - especially against young people.

"To execute people simply because they are gay or have had gay sex just isn't acceptable in the 21st century," he exclaimed.

Their comments follow the public hangings of Mahmoud Asgari, 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, 18, on 19 July in Mashad, provincial capital of Iran's northeastern Khorasan province, on charges of homosexuality.

Asgari had been accused of raping a 13-year-old boy, though Outrage believed those allegations were trumped up to undermine public sympathy for the two youths, both of whom maintain they were unaware homosexual acts were punishable by death, an AP news report said on Sunday.

"The judiciary has trampled its own laws," Asgari's lawyer, Rohollah Razez Zadeh, was quoted as saying, explaining that Iranian courts were supposed to commute death sentences handed to children to five years in jail, but the country's Supreme Court allowed the hangings to proceed.

Meanwhile on Saturday, Iran's Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi condemned the executions, reaffirming her determination to ban the execution of minors.

"My calls for a law banning execution of under-18s have fallen on deaf ears so far but I will not give up the fight," the AP quoted her as saying, calling the executions a violation of Iran's obligations under the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Prior to the boys' executions, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes. The length of their detention suggests that they committed the so-called offences more than a year earlier, when they were possibly around the age of 16, a statement by Outrage explained.

Citing Iranian human rights campaigners, Outrage claims over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Iranian revolution of 1979. In total, an estimated 100,000 Iranians have been put to death over the last 26 years of clerical rule, including women who had sex outside of marriage and political opponents of the Islamist government.

According to ILGA, Iran is one of at least seven countries today which still retain capital punishment for homosexuality. Others include Mauritania, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The situation with regard to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is unclear.

In the wake of the hangings, Amnesty International (AI) on Friday called on Tehran to put a final stop to state executions, explaining as a state party to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the CRC, Iran had undertaken not to execute anyone for an offence committed when they were under the age of 18.

For the past four years, the Iranian authorities have been considering legislation that would prohibit the use of the death penalty for offences committed by persons under the age of 18. Under Article 1210(1) of Iran’s Civil Code, the ages of 15 lunar years for boys and nine lunar years for girls are set out as the age of criminal responsibility, an AI statement said.

In January 2005, following its consideration of Iran's second periodic report on its implementation of the provisions of the CRC, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the body of independent experts established under this Convention to monitor states parties' compliance with the treaty, urged Iran:

"to take the necessary steps to immediately suspend the execution of all death penalties imposed on persons for having committed a crime before the age of 18, to take the appropriate legal measures to convert them to penalties in conformity with the provisions of the Convention and to abolish the death penalty as a sentence imposed on persons for having committed crimes before the age of 18, as required by article 37 of the Convention."

© IRIN
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies.]

Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 03:31 AM GMT+1 [Link]

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

URGENT! Get a doctor's prescription for junk food!

You think you don't need it? You're right. Doctors, the pharma industry and the whole illness corporate welfare conglomerate will never allow a law like that. After all, they are hooked on high revenue and for that you must eat junk food round the clock and not only in an emergency, either the one from the snack bar chains or the one from the super-market shelves, in order to propel you to their practices and pharmacies. So they resent that you can help yourself and at low cost to some extent with Vitamin C and other supplements, if you are a junk food junky because you are addicted, don't know about such nutrition truths and matters or are poor and have no access to better food. After all, the IRS extortionists for instance and the left feminists have kept our mothers and wives from the kitchen and even ourselves, as we have to work too much, and Science has established its legal economic monopoly about what we have or need to ingurgitate. We are severed from nature and our bodies and in some still existing home cooking centers (formerly called kitchens) we exercise more tampering with food than in any pharma or GM food lab. At least those who have kept some sense and some closeness to the exigencies of nature and our inherited genes we have in common with apes (we've kept the alpha dog behaviour, but not the eating habits...) know better what to do to keep themselves out of those spins and loops and slings of the health to illness perpetuum mobile. But they are now equally threatened by what is coming up, not just those who need supplements because their food is not as it should be, but those who have an urgency to repair as far as possible past errors in nutrition. It must not be chemically synthesized supplements like Vitamin C, it can be natural extracts and concentrates of the same. The CODEX ALIMENTARIUS I had warned against here like follows:is now rushing forward, so that it's becoming even more urgent to protest. From the Butterbach.Net suddenly boycotting newsletters RRND and FND I gather the following:

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO. Show the thugs that you are the sovereign! And instead of boycotting good things, boycott bad things, stop buying the wrong things, buy here [this is not paid advertising]: Nature's First Law, ORKOS, Passion4Fruit, Essbare Landschaften [translation: Eatable Landscapes], at the weekly (or better daily) open-air vegetable market, at your organic farmer or gardener, at your natural food store, at your own garden, at the fresh food sections of exotic shops or even at the fruit and vegetable section of the supermarkets, if you are of the sturdier sort and want to preserve yourself with pesticides. And in God or Darwin's woods and meadows...

[This blog post is NOT sponsored by McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy's etc.]

Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 07:34 PM GMT+1 [Link]

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Regime Libertarians

The above is the title of a happily much noticed fundamental article by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., published just the day before yesterday. It is already forcing people all over the place to say where they stand. Lew Rockwell has really taken the words right of my mouth here. One simply must love this man. I do. For this article alone and so many others. You should also. He has put his finger in that gaping wound that is driving me mad these days. And he has taken a stand, the right one, a principled one. It is about time that we all do it too, namely a courageous, truly revolutionary one, not some wishy-washy kind of time losing compromise. Tell the Beltway to get lost. Whereas
  1. Constitutionalistically principled Michael Badnarik (who recently gained some physical weight, a sure sign of a wrong diet; he should ask me for some advice...) is in the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital, so could not comment, as he intended, on the LP's Iraq Exit Strategy, which may have contributed to his minor cardiac event... (latest news: he is home from the hospital and went shopping first thing for healthy food!)
  2. Thomas L. Knapp in his fishnet stockings is really an example of the multiple personality disorder he sees in others. He is sitting right in my wound, but read his, like always super intelligent and super informed, interesting and enlightening (on the situation!) rebuttals: of Lew Rockwell and Chris Claypoole, who had sided with Lew Rockwell. You cannot only meet him walking and working on both sides of that street, but on every corner at the same time lately, except on my site.

Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 11:51 PM GMT+1 [Link]

Sunday, July 10, 2005

A majority for the wrong decision

Today a majority of voters in my home country, the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, voted Yes for the European Constitution. How Grand! And how low...

Wrong decisions of a majority, that's what the world is made of since thousands of years. And the result is visible everywhere. See London...

I published a short comment in Luxemburgish in the blog of my Luxemburgish site. A translation follows:

Further, but much smaller bad news

The version (6.2.1) of my mail client Eudora I bought a couple of months ago is a bug's pain in the acronym. All the same holds true of my browser Opera. I used both since the earliest times, as I adore both. But now I am exasperated by some of the most incredible bugs in them. To enjoy those nifty new features added, you apparently have to live with a few unacceptable elementary bugs. I assume and hope that the very latest versions are better, the previous ones having been put on the market in a hurry, being still betas, it seems. Or why would the different versions follow each other so quickly?

I am waiting for help from Eudora as I cannot use it anymore at all. My mail client is my most important piece of software. I can access my mailboxes these days only via webmail, which limits me excessively. Please bear with me.

A big disappointment of a different kind: the announced private visit of Ken Schoolland and Virgis Daukas to the headquarters wink in Hamburg of "The Exterritorial Imperative" will not take place this week as planned. I hope Tom is not also responsible for that. wink

TREMENDOUS GOOD NEWS

I have been able to perfectly restore all my data lost on February 8!!! Plus a great deal of my data lost in 2001 and earlier and I expect to be able to restore the rest in a not too distant future. There remains a lot of work to be done to integrate those recovered treasures in such a way as to be used efficiently again. ~~ Beware you government thugs and majority (or minority!) dummies, I am armed again, and better than ever!...

And my general staff wink is in best health. The two latest intellectual weapons they developed are presented here:

Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 10:59 PM GMT+1 [Link]

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Flaccid Dick

Is this the right header to start reviving this blog after almost seven weeks of silence, I don't know, you tell me. But it certainly is to introduce to you Jonathan David Morris's column "The Dick Durbin Affair"! This new exclusive to my site is an angry (meaning: not his usual sense of humour in it) afterthought to his column "Free Speech vs. the Flag" on Strike the Root he was still brooding about (about that chivalrous end maybe?). JDM didn't even mention in the afterthought that Durbin caved in and apologized. "Just didn't seem necessary." he says. Flaccid Dick indeed!

As plugging STR is no sin in my religion and could help healing and saving the world, I'll tell you that this week they had a quote on their home page that I particularly liked (no wonder, considering its author), so I think that this deep quote should find its place on my profound site also. Here it is:

As I am very late with my blogging, I now have first to mention JDM's latest column (a new one is on its way today, so I better hurry) and then his six earlier ones I had not yet drawn your attention to.

Let's move from Old Glory to something less flickering in the wind, monuments: How To Remember 9/11 (Without Really Trying). My comment: Absolutely great. The last paragraph is perfect. No, really. It is about time to have such real great solid universal all time feeling expressed. In simple white marble. It gloriously changes one from the kind of sugary feeling that is gluing us ~~ apart all over the place in the media and politics.

And here are the earlier goodies you may have missed:

And don't dare to think that those three columns above I did not add a comment to are run-of-the-mill ones or you will be in for a surprise!

Counting Roman, Thinking Better

The above header refers to Kevin Tuma's
Principles of Liberty
which are
16 Affirmations for Those Who Would Live Free
They are published on this site and on Liberty For All. Read or re-read those scrumptious 16 menu items. They are healthier than your daily newspaper, TV or radio fare and less likely to make you put on weight on the wrong spots.

I might have been even more radical, if I had written them. For instance, regarding the notion of "social contract" [which gives me hiccups!] in Affirmation X., I would rather side with Spooner than with Rousseau...

"Civilized nations allow secession. Tyrants and barbarians do not." That's in Affirmation IX. I couldn't agree more. For tyrannicide you maybe first need to lose some fat (see above). ;-)

Some who need to lose fat too are those who think that libertarians are conservatives. Here again Kevin Tuma provides the correct diet with his article published on this site and on Ether Zone simply called

What is a Conservative?
which are
Five Necessary Ingredients
Now, what is a conservative?: a libertarian with a bank account, oops, with a belief in traditional values. But better read Kevin Tuma who can tell you more about it. And while the Left may have a lack of traditional values, they most often these days are those who have the bank accounts... That is also a tradition, as it dates back to the times when the commonalty sat on the left in the States General. The Left of those times leading to the French Revolution was the one that comprised the bourgeois class which had the money and opposed the aristocracy which had the manners. Anything changed?

More on this further down. Anyway, Kevin Tuma's article is a good companion to the one of JDM about the ZAP. And how topical. See the Supreme Court decision on eminent domain. Therefore, to show how the statist left is smashing the libertarian right, Kevin Tuma sent me an adequate and smashing cartoon, published on a good number of sites at the moment:

Homewreckers (cartoon)
Now it's time for a visit:

The Philosophy of Liberty Revisited

Forced, to an increasing degree, by the circumstances and those who make them, to go to the core, to the basics, and in view of the above articles dealing with many of those basics, it is time to revisit Ken Schoolland's
The Philosophy of Liberty
as there is good news. In Ken's
Tale of the PoL Animation
added to the above page, there is little known info, news about the animation's further spread and about new developments, including various links to other pages and downloads. Don't miss it!

But there is more. A major new essay by Ken, which I therefore have placed as (chronological) #2 in my new rubric "Main Fare ~" on my home page, which is supposed to offer striking, important, in one way or another fundamental texts. This is his speech at the Freedom Fest in Las Vegas this year, a little edited (some corrections, some additions):

Life and Death Taboo: The Economics and Ethics of Financial Incentives for Organ Donations
Already in April 1998, Ken had commented on the topic in the Small Business News, Hawaii, the state where the shortage of organs is especially acute. Let me quote a few lines from that comment:More to come from Ken soon, as I have material on hand already from the following authors (I just hadn't the time yet to deal with it, also because there are major changes in the works regarding my web servers and the revamping of some of my sites):

Edward Eugene Baskett, Beau Cain, Richard C. B. Johnsson, Stefan Metzeler, Jonathan David Morris, Oronzo Renna, Richard Rieben, Ken Schoolland... Etc.

But there is also bad news:

Tom Knapp Is Boycotting Butterbach.Net/Exterritorial.Net

Thomas L. Knapp, in spite of having, by priority, the day before publication, received an advance notice (with access to the text), of the above important libertarian essay on organ donation by Ken Schoolland, and having received a reminder two days later, which reminder also went to his editors Brad Spangler, Mary Lou Seymour and Steve Trinward, has apparently (we are now more than two weeks later!) not deemed it necessary to include it in Rational Review News Digest's and Freedom News Daily's commentary sections. Prof. Schoolland is of course only a director of ISIL and only one of the best known and best selling best authors of the libertarian movement, only one of the most active libertarian activists and only one of the speakers most in demand. And only a pillar of our philosophy.

Many things with me or my websites may be wrong, but this for many years has not prevented friend Tom and me to plug each other's work and websites almost systematically. What's wrong with Tom?

Left loyalties gone berserk?

Dark Clouds

This large well visited site would have to go offline pronto, had I to rely on my own revenue to offset its high costs. I am a pensioner who has been flatly denied an old age pension at all. Next month it will be two years that I am battling to get a pension and I will probably have to battle a few more years and the result is not sure. So far I have had a few partial successes, but what I get as my own pension is still only a fraction of the guaranteed minimum income in Germany (less than half what it would be in my home country Luxemburg). So my partial pension is filled up to reach the amount a young single welfare recipient would get, plus, as I am over 65, almost 50 Euro more. But this money is an advance only on the expected pension. Meaning that when I recently started to get my first partial pension of 20,34 Euro, the retroactive amount that was due was not paid to me, but to the welfare office. So you can imagine that it is not easy, with the Euro (I cannot go into details about this here), my bad health and a very costly old cat as a mate who is ill. Keeping a website is out of the question.

That I do keep one though is certainly not a result of my donation page. I have received small amounts only a few times and they were largely assorted with requests to do some work for the donors which resulted in my academic work being paid at the rate of a slave or rather an illegal Polish cleaning lady.

This site exists because practically all its expenses (except those I literally save from my mouth) are paid by ONE sponsor. This used to be my friend C. Neal Brady who died. He has been succeeded by another friend.

She has been making loud noises lately about stopping that support. As a woman with a heart she has been supporting other people in need, with her heart on the left (supposedly the right place) two Communist publications are on her support list. On the phone a few days ago she said that we never had that much in common, this after several decades of friendship. Friendship with her, with her mate and with her ex-husband who is not alive anymore. She does not have Internet access at home anymore since the time her mate passed away a couple of years ago. Maybe I have sent her too many print-outs of my website or the wrong ones, but more likely she is influenced by several people in her entourage, practically all hammer and sickle intellectuals ~~ who do have internet access.

Isn't that a perfect illustration of my above hints about the left and the bank accounts? She may have acted more out of compassion than out of intellectual camaraderie, though I, on my part, had seen an awful lot of that too! When two people speak the same, they do not mean the same.

So now you know what you have to do, if this site is dear to your heart.

Flag Fellating American Duty?

As I already said on my Op-Ed page, Rex Curry's latest column really sums it up! I like it really very much:
Desecration Amendment to Constitution must be stopped
And as I wrote to Rex: "After so many years of fellating it, couldn't they now bugger it? ;-)"

A little afterthought maybe? Rex, as any non-American gay man with experience with Americans (and gays normally do have that experience, having visited, often frequently, or having catered to tourists, students, GIs or members of staff of American corporate or government offices around the world) could tell you, and the fag hags can only confirm, Americans have, the reputation of the French notwithstanding (another instance maybe of something French having to be renamed Freedom?), a particular obsession with fellation. And it's not verbal. That's after all how those gays often can talk straights round. And with pleasure comes habit. Those flag hags then are simply part of the culture. And you Americans owe so much to the French, as you know, whereas the Germans owe so much to you!
wink

Fringe Groups of Liberty

No use, it seems, to draw Tom's attention to the next "striking, important, fundamental" text in my "Main Fare ~" rubric, (chronological) #3:
Something Is Rotten In Academia (?)
Universities are like medieval guilds, so that Prof. Hans Hermann Hoppe can feel at ease there in these "gated communities". Or did I get something wrong here? wink

Well, better see for yourself and read what Richard C. B. Johnsson is revealing us. How often do you run into a libertarian quoting Bakunin, eh?

What a delight to throw that name in the face of my libertarian audience!!! They will have to double their ration of Valium, which will raise the economy, the market, you know. wink

Bye-bye!

Wendy McElroy is always busy like hell, but with better results for us sinners. Oh, the sinners are not we, the devils are sitting on the Mountain (La Montagne), as our modern versions of Robespierre and Danton. Against those Wendy always has good advice. She is not only always good, but lately she has become even better, as I like it that now she writes so clearly in that advice form: "Be a genuine pain in the tuckus."

Here are her latest columns not yet referred to in this notewok (and a new one is on its way already!):

Till next!


C.B.

Hamburg, Germany, July 5 & 6, 2005

Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 11:32 PM GMT+1 [Link]

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