AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A heavy metal rock festival hoping to hold an open-air concert in an area known as the Dutch Bible Belt received a permit on one condition: no cursing.

The Elsrock festival caused an uproar last year when it was held for the first time outside the small, heavily religious town of Rijssen, 75 miles east of Amsterdam.

Two religious political parties complained that heavy metal “is typified by lyrics about death and decay, and vocals that change between a hellish wail and deep grunts.”

Churches protesting a new concert this year were pacified only by “the stated readiness of the organizers to make sure that no blasphemous words are used, and that the honor of God’s name is not besmirched,” Mayor Bort Koelewijn wrote in a letter granting the permit, made public Tuesday.

A tall order indeed for any group of godless heathens.

And just to be perfectly clear…

“Should there in practice be any blasphemy, I’ll ask the district attorney to prosecute.”

[Warning: contains graphic scenes which some people may find distressing]

I had all but abandoned the concept of radio since the mid-90s - inane babble from DJs interrupting the flow of music, grating ads and worst of all, hearing the same half-dozen songs played every day for weeks on end made me feel like I was losing the will to live whenever I was subjected to it (mostly at work). But in the last few years, Internet radio has restored my faith. Having a large MP3 collection allows me to take control and be my own DJ, but sometimes it’s nice to let someone else take control and be surprised.

Internet radio is particularly good for niche music. The kinds of stations I tend to gravitate most to are the Gothic variety.

Radio Free Abattoir

Gothville

R1Live

Web Radio 24

Vampirefreaks.com

Tormentedradio.com

If an Internet radio station is particularly good, I’ll save some content using Streamripper for listening afterwards.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraq’s military Wednesday reported significant reduction in violence a month after launching a coalition crackdown in the war-racked capital.

The numbers of deadly attacks, assassination attempts, bombings, mortar strikes and kidnappings have dropped since the operation’s mid-February launch, said Iraqi Brig. Gen. Qassim Atta.

The number of civilians killed in Baghdad in the past four weeks was 265, compared with 1,440 killings from mid-January to mid-February, said Atta, a spokesman for the operation. (Effects of crackdown)

Atta also reported that 94 terrorists were killed in the February-March period, compared with 19 in the January-February time frame.

Do they not get what is going on? Of course the levels of violence are down. The insurgents have decided not to play along with Bush’s game plan. They only fight on their terms, not the Bush Administration’s.

The insurgents in Iraq are doing what every group of rebels has done in all of these conflicts: when their enemy advertised the fact that they were going to hammer them, they simply sidestepped the blow by packing away their guns and staying at home. The insurgents will continue to hide until the enemy leaves or reduces their troop levels. Then they will resume their fight as they did before the surge.

That’s what George Washington did with the British - he largely kept his army intact while avoiding fights with the British that he knew he couldn’t win.

The Vietcong did the same with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where they refused to fight the US forces head-to-head in conventional WWII style battles.

The IRA did that in Ireland against the British. We used to call it ‘putting the pike in the thatch because there will be another day’

The partisans did that with the Germans in World War II

The so-called ’surge’ only has about another six months to run its course. After that the US will begin cutting its losses and pulling out. At that point it will have been five years of the US not winning in Iraq - no politician will able to afford afford to prolong the war any further without any tangible demonstration of progress. Naturally after the US loses the war in Iraq, the Republicans will try to offload the responsibility for their failure to the Democrats and liberals. Rather than face up to their own responsibility for their incompetent handling of the war, they will try to claim that they were stabbed in the back by the Democrats through lack of sufficient support. The actual reality is both the Democrats and the American public have given Bush and his party everything they asked for during the last 4 years or so in the hopes of making progress in Iraq.

Post 9-11, from 2001 to 2005, Bush had the support of the majority of the Democratic leadership for all of his military campaigns. As much as the Democrats may regret it now, their voting records in support of the Bush administration cannot be changed. Instead of graciously accepting their support, Bush squandered it for his own party’s short-term political gain by exploiting the war on terror as a wedge issue to gain votes.

Now nearly 4 years later, the situation in Iraq is worse than it ever was. Somehow I doubt very much if the American public is going to wait another much longer for the Republicans or the Democrats to get it right. At most, they probably have one year to go before the public demands a withdrawal from Iraq. In effect, both parties will have to obey the public’s wishes whether they like it or not.

The latest Web 2.0 fad is Twitter - an online service that allows any narcissist to broadcast to the entire world what they are currently up to. If you thought blogging was bad, this takes the trend of online narcisism to it’s extreme. I don’t actually claim to be completely innocent of that myself - I wouldn’t have this blog if I wasn’t - but it is comforting to know there are people out there who are clearly worse that I will ever be.

Michele Neylon puts the Twitter fad in perspective:

I’m really sick of all these web 2.0 fanboys. It’s like the dotcom boom with slightly older people, or something.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the web applications and services are really cool AND useful. They may even have a business plan behind them so that they’ll actually be around in 6 months time ….

Twitter (it doesn’t even deserve a link!) simply isn’t.

It’s probably the biggest waste of time I’ve come across in years.

Does anyone really give a damn what other people are doing all the time.

“I just got up”
“I made coffee”
“My girlfriend is having morning sickness” - stop the lights!! Headline news!

Naturally this has had some twitterers in a twitch defending their latest obsession - proving correct the old adage, that every absurdity has a champion who will defend it.

If you don’t like it, “then fucking don’t subscribe”

Indeed we won’t. But that doesn’t mean we still can’t have fun taking the piss out of it. Any group of people who consciously refer to themselves as ‘twits’ really do need to take a step back to gain some perspective on the situation.

“I’m bored at work”
“I’m on the bus home”
“I’m taking a dump”
“I’m having a Pot Noodle”
“I’m having a wank”

Twitter supports txt messenging, so it is actually possible to send updates about your current whereabouts from the throne if you are so inclined.

Apparently the founders of Twitter are really pleased with the websites success. In their finest Valley Girl slang, they mention on their blog: “We totally won the SXSW Web Awards last Sunday! “

And people wonder where stereotypes come from.

Of course American companies have based their operations abroad for years to take advantage of generous tax breaks. Ireland is a prime example of that.

But I have to laugh at the spin Haliburton put out about ‘helping the troops’, as if what they are doing is more about patriotism and less about making a fast buck at the US tax payers expense. The folks in the White House practically shovelled the no-bid contracts at them, and this is what they get in return. They claim that moving their HQ to the Middle East is to enable them to get closer to their main source of business, but that could easily be achieved by simply opening a branch office.

Haliburton are entitled to do whatever they think is best for their business. But they shouldn’t expect any more handouts from the US government for very little in return.

I think if it were more profitable to do so, Haliburton would help out America’s enemies. Oh wait, it looks like they have already tried to do just that. No doubt Karl Marx would marvel at the ability of US companies to sell rope to their own country’s hangman.

The 19-year-old Saudi woman was abducted by a gang of men wielding kitchen knives who took her to a farm where she was raped 14 times by her captors. Five men were arrested for the rape and given jail terms ranging from 10 months to five years by a panel of judges in the eastern Saudi city of Qatif, near the teenager’s hometown.

But the judges also decided to sentence the young woman, identified only as “G,” to 90 lashes. “G” was told by one of the judges that she was lucky not to have been given jail time. She said yesterday that she would appeal against her sentence.

The woman told the Saudi Gazette that she tried to commit suicide because of her ordeal and was beaten by her younger brother because the rape had brought shame on their family.

It would be nice to hear the views of western feminists on this one.

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts, and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.

But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans.

Apparently we Irish are not even Celtic and instead are more closely related to the Basques in Spain.

Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.

The Celtic cultural myth “is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature is that they are not English,” said Dr. Sykes, an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286.

Dr. Oppenheimer said genes “have no bearing on cultural history.” There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.

Overflights by military helicopters in the so-called region will also be stopped, says the Irish Sun newspaper.

A massive British Army watchtower, which overlooks Crossmaglen village, was dismantled last month.

“I can tell you today, in addition to the watchtowers, the British Army will be out of Crossmaglen within weeks,” an Irish Government source told the paper.

The South Armagh region was once the most militarised in western Europe during the Troubles, with 3,000 British troops deployed in an area with a population of only 23,000.

Soldiers had to travel by helicopter because of the threat of IRA snipers or booby trap bombs on the roads.

IRA operations led to the deaths of 115 soldiers and 42 RUC officers between 1970 and 1997.

A normalisation programme agreed between the Irish and British governments will see the reduction of troop levels and British Army bases in Northern Ireland from 64 to 14 by July 2007, and to only 10 by April 2008.

The scale-down was set in motion following arms decommissioning by the IRA.

The Irish and British governments hope more progress can be achieved after Wednesday’s Assembly elections in the North and that the DUP and Sinn Féin will share power in devolved institutions.

It doesn’t really hit you how fat the Irish population is until you travel abroad. One of the first things I noticed when I arrived in New Zealand was how thin the average person is over here compared with back home. I can recall being on holidays in Italy a few years ago and being asked by a Lebanese tour guide ‘how come all Irish males over the age of 35 have big fat beer bellies’. Perhaps we should try the Mediterranean diet for a change. Women aren’t much better than men - pint drinking women wearing ill fitting tank tops with bulging bellies on a Saturday night don’t exactly do wonders for sex appeal, beer goggles notwithstanding of course.

The school kids these days are noticeably fatter too. It doesn’t help the situation when you have overindulgent parents driving their kids everywhere.

Funny how we used to laugh at the Americans are being obese. By my estimate, we are only about 10 years behind America in terms of obesity. I’m sure we’ll eventually catch up with them someday in the not too distant future.

I meet Luay. He is too scared to be identified and does not want to use his full name.

He was dragged off the street by armed men and forcibly circumcised - a practice not allowed in the Mandaean religion.

He is 19 and is now unlikely ever to find a bride from his own faith.

Worse, he was forcibly converted. That means in the eyes of those same extremists if he now declares himself Mandaean he is apostate.

That makes him a traitor to Islam, who may be murdered. He says he will not be safe in any Muslim country.

It doesnt get any more barbaric than this. It does make me wonder whether fundamentalism in Islam can ever really be tamed. Or if it’s actually possible, it’s going to take a very long time, possibly centuries. Iraq used to have about 2 million Christians at one point, but they were almost all eventually driven out. Christians use to exist in their millions in other middle eastern countries as well, but they were driven out of there over the course of the last century. Same story for Jews as well. The derangement against them goes way beyond the usual historical animosities into something completely pathological.

I know we’ve seen a similar situation in Northern Ireland, although that was driven more by politics and less by religion, and Iraq is like Northern Ireland on steroids. To find a similar parallel of the same scale with Christianity, you would have to go back to the religious wars of the 1600s.

We can only hope for the sake of the middle east, that the religion gradually becomes more tolerant as time progresses - much in the same way Christianity and other religions did.

If that doesn’t happen, then us folks in the West are gradually going to pull out of the middle east as we become less dependent on oil and the place will be left to rot. Eventually it will be nothing more than Muslims fighting Muslims and nobody will care about it. It will be another ‘Africa’ where blacks are killing blacks every day of the week, but because whites are not involved in the killing, it doesn’t make the headlines.

How to identify a left-wing extremist:

–believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

–believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.

–believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

–tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

–doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

–believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

–believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

–believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

–believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

–believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

–is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

–dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

–regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

Naturally I don’t agree with some of the points he made. The fact that US politics are so skewed towards the right means that some of the political views he outlines above would be extreme by US standards, but quite uncontroversial in Europe or pretty much any place outside of the US. That being said however, I do think they are interesting and thought provoking points nonetheless

Mainstream media Vs the blogosphere
Despite all the hype from the blogosphere, I think blogs still have a long way to go before the medium can realistically compete with the mainstream media. The rivalry between so-called the mainstream media and the blogosphere has only intensified now that mainstream journalists have turned their hands to blogging and dared to criticise the blogosphere. I happen to think that mainstream journalists who blog tend give the best of both worlds - the greater freedom of expression that blogging allows combined with the professional training of a full-time journalist - less ranting, more basic fact checking etc. I also think the fact that writers in both mediums are engaging each other in criticism and debate is a good thing in the long run for journalism of all varieties.

Mainstream media Vs the Liberals
Like Joe Klein, I generally consider myself a moderate centrist like who does not believe that any one side of the political spectrum has all of the answers. I tend to vote for a political parties primarily on their competency rather than their ideology. I think paying attention to ideology is a waste of time anyway. Most mainstream political parties stand for very little and whatever principles they start out with promptly get sacrificed as soon as they obtain any degree of significant power. Everybody knows this, few people like to admit it, especially the cheerleaders on either side of the political spectrum.

As far as the political left goes, I think a little criticism and debate is a really good thing. Part of what has gotten the US Republicans into such a mess is the complete stifling of any form of real criticism or dissent. The result being blind loyalty to the party and its leadership which has corrupted the party and is distorted the ideals it once stood for. If the left in America and Europe wants to avoid that debacle, then I think debate and dialogue should be encouraged.

Klein answers his critics here

A liberal critic answers back

May the debate continue…