Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The Parlous State of Our World

The main course on the menu of misery afflicting humankind is of course and for the moment the proxy war now ongoing in the Middle East: State of Israel defending its existence against Hezbollah, murderers extraordinare determined to perform its masters' bidding. Masters, in this instance can be defined as Islamic jihad and the Will of Allah; Syria; Iran. Israel being the entry point to eventual domination of the world at large. Rather extravagent ambition but these fundamentalist Islamists do really believe the sky's the limit.

For other items on the menu I had but to glance at one single page of one of the daily newspapers we subscribe to:
  1. At least 53 Shia workmen were killed and more than 100 wounded as they waited for jobs as day labourers in the town of Kufa, near the Shia holy city of Najaf. The attack came as the country was digesting news of a massacre on Monday that killed 50 mostly Shiites in a market in Mahmoudiya. (This is all depressingly familiar in a country that has succumbed to the monstrous condition of sectarian hatred and violence.)
  2. A doctor and two nurses were charged with murder yesterday after being accused of killing hospital patients in last year's Hurricane Katrina disaster. The three are alleged by authorities in New Orleans to have treated elderly patients with lethal doses of barbiturates as conditions in the city's Memorial Medical Centre deteriorated in the days after the hurricane struck. (In their defence, colleagues maintain that the health workers at the hospital felt they had been utterly abandoned, that the stress of trying to cope with the wounded and the sick under unbelievably trying conditions compelled them to succumb to a euthenasia approach to supporting life.)
  3. Indonesia has pledged to build a country-wide tsunami alert system as rescuers hauled bodies from ravaged beaches, homes and hotels in the wake of a magnitude 7.7 undersea quake on Monday which triggered walls of water that crashed into a 180-kilometre stretch of beach on Java island which destroyed houses, restaurants and hotels, and threw boats, cars and motorbikes far inland. The death toll to date stands at 341 with 229 missing, numbers expected to climb. (The dreadful 2004 Asian tsunami wasn't sufficiently disastrous, obviously, to encourage Indonesia to ensure adequate warning would be in place for all of its territory.)
  4. The United States Senate approved funds for stem-cell research. U.S. President George W. Bush has refused to ratify the bill likening it to "murder", rather than advancing scientific discovery in the search for potential cures for incurable diseases. (This is where the orthodoxy of religion rears its righteous head to deny science the opportunity to upstage God.)
  5. Italian police yesterday freed 113 Polish nationals living like slaves in forced labour camps in Italy's southern region of Puglia, where those refusing to work were raped, tortured with metal batons and attacked by dogs. (And who says that human beings are imbued with intelligence of a higher order than other animals?)
Well yes, of course we cannot overlook the dreadful bombings in Mumbai and the current state of relations between two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, where because of suspicions that Pakistan has harboured the terrorists who bombed Mumbai, their vital peace talks have been suspended.

The indigestive pain of it all!

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 19, 2006

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