Iran Axes Footie Players For Displaying Green

In an act of solidarity with the uprising in Iran, some soccer players wore green wrist bands during a World Cup qualifying match. Suddenly, they have been retired.

Their gesture attracted worldwide comment and drew the attention of football fans to Iran's political turmoil. Now the country's authorities have taken revenge by imposing life bans on players who sported green wristbands in a recent World Cup match in protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election.

According to the pro-government newspaper Iran, four players – Ali Karimi, 31, Mehdi Mahdavikia, 32, Hosein Ka'abi, 24 and Vahid Hashemian, 32 – have been "retired" from the sport after their gesture in last Wednesday's match against South Korea in Seoul.

They were among six players who took to the field wearing wristbands in the colour of the defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, which has been adopted by demonstrators who believe the 12 June election was stolen.

What a great "F-you" gesture by the players. I admire their courage.

We Don't Like It: But the Taliban are Popular in Pakistan

With the Taliban creeping up on Islamabad, the world is becoming concerned that Pakistan will be taken over by Islamic extremists. I wrote a few days ago that nobody in the main stream media reports as to whether the Taliban are popular or not. It seems that with everything I read, the angle of the story is like a zombie movie scenario where the Taliban are multiplying by contagion to the unwitting, and unwilling populace.

Google makes things easy and I came upon this article from the Guardian. The Taliban and Islamic Law are popular in the "tribal" areas.

Though there is strong support for better female access to health and education, there was profound reluctance among the largely male survey respondents to empower women more generally, with 67% supporting "honour killings". Over 50% of those polled believed Islamic law brought peace to the region and only 3.6%considered the Taliban to be terrorists.

This is appalling, but not surprising. The western, liberal lifestyle is rejected over there. Let's stop acting disingenuous.

Fear and Hysteria at the Guardian

One hears a lot from the leftists that people on the right exploit fear. For example, Noam Chomsky says:

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Michael Moore often plays this card as well. It's as if terrorists are mostly just bogeymen made up by the right.

But where else can you find anything more hysterical than the fear mongering about Global Warming doomsday scenarios? I was taking a look at The Guardian today, and they take fear to a new level in this article:

If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity

....

Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest there is nothing that can be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon.

....

The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

My brother made a good point that Environmentalism is the new religion. Built in is the clause that if you don't believe, the WORLD WILL END! So start believing now!