I remember the time I had my first smoke
try it just once friends gently proposed
friends told me yes light a ciggi for a start
you would like the fire in the pretty girls heart
with cigarette in my hand I felt like man 2
My hero look so right with the cig on his lips
could I go wrong if i follow his tips
on the job I learned .....
cigarette had a place in every work day too
cigarette started evey hr of my day
could not get out of habit no way
with cigarette in my hand I felt like man 2
When moments were a little lonesome
cigarette and I happy to sing
cigarette slowly became my cruch
my energy and stamina are lost very much
until one day i couldn't stand on my feet
smoke made me feel real dead piece
then I realized I had payed a price
with cigarette in my hand I was a dead man
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
By Johann Hari
April 12, 2009 "Huffington Post" --- Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the- shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.
April 12, 2009 "Huffington Post" --- Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the- shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Technical: Getting gtalk current music track on vista
Hi,
I spend this morning getting current music track status on gtalk. Although the job is trivial but there is a trick involved when you have a vista operating system. Had to figure out my self with some hit n trials.
Problem statements:
When you install gtalk messenger setting current playing track on wmp11 as the status on gtalk does not work.
googling on the net give result with lots of people advising for re-installing wm11 and gtalk and then trying. Do not do this, its just waste of time.
Assumption:
wmp11 on vista as the base environment
follow the steps and you will be done without much of pain:
1)
download gtalk setup. right click->run as administrator (this is the key step)
-> accept the t/c and carry on the installation. You can see the installation being done at C:/Program files/
-> Once installed go to wmp11->tools->options->plugins->background
->on the right pane you can see gtalk with selectable box
-> If it is not selected select it... Apply and you are done.
Run you gtalk set current music track and let the world know what you are listening to.
cheers
tanweer
I spend this morning getting current music track status on gtalk. Although the job is trivial but there is a trick involved when you have a vista operating system. Had to figure out my self with some hit n trials.
Problem statements:
When you install gtalk messenger setting current playing track on wmp11 as the status on gtalk does not work.
googling on the net give result with lots of people advising for re-installing wm11 and gtalk and then trying. Do not do this, its just waste of time.
Assumption:
wmp11 on vista as the base environment
follow the steps and you will be done without much of pain:
1)
download gtalk setup. right click->run as administrator (this is the key step)
-> accept the t/c and carry on the installation. You can see the installation being done at C:/Program files/
-> Once installed go to wmp11->tools->options->plugins->background
->on the right pane you can see gtalk with selectable box
-> If it is not selected select it... Apply and you are done.
Run you gtalk set current music track and let the world know what you are listening to.
cheers
tanweer
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Recently there has been a series of events reported from the coastal city Manglore in the state Karnataka. Each, worthy enough to jolt any civil democratic society. A lesser known group comes to lime light by this act. A group of 10 or at most 20 storm into a bar and drag out couples from the bar. Threw girls on the street, slapped and kicked men and valdalised the whole bar. Neither of it was done in the cover of night, it was a daring act done in braod day light.
A similar incidence, more alarming than the previous incidence happened in the same city, by the same group. More alarming because at the receiving end was daughter of MLA. She was dragged out of a moving bus in front of every one because she was talking to a muslim boy(her acquaintance) in the bus. As per news papers, the bus conductor was member of the orginasation and informed them about it. They came, stopped the bus, dragged both of them out of the bus and beat them before forcefully putting them in an auto and kidnapping them. The girl was released after an hour while the boy is reportedly missing.
Although both the incidences have been done by the same organization as acknowledged by the ring leader. No action has been taken against them. These are not one of the incidents, there are many like these but go un-reported. Courtesy, Our police and our respected leaders have a tendency to react only when any incidence is on national news, there courage grew un-checked. Some arresting have been made but I feel they are too little too late. Surprisingly the rise in these incidences matches with the rise in power of BJP in the state. This theory is supported by the fact that no action whatsoever has been taken against the culprit ( except for some arresting). Interestingly non of the major parties have asked for serious action against the hooligans, except for some comments on the ruling state government.
Does this mean that the parties feel, this is the verdict of the masses and it will hurt their lok sabha prospects if they go against this verdict?
If this is true then who is going the decide the law of the land? An organization run by hulligans in the name of Lord or the constitution written by our respected leader.
Are our leaders so weak that they can not think in the intrest of our country. If they feel what happened was right then bring a law for it. Do not let a group of people decide what is correct for a common and what is not.
A similar incidence, more alarming than the previous incidence happened in the same city, by the same group. More alarming because at the receiving end was daughter of MLA. She was dragged out of a moving bus in front of every one because she was talking to a muslim boy(her acquaintance) in the bus. As per news papers, the bus conductor was member of the orginasation and informed them about it. They came, stopped the bus, dragged both of them out of the bus and beat them before forcefully putting them in an auto and kidnapping them. The girl was released after an hour while the boy is reportedly missing.
Although both the incidences have been done by the same organization as acknowledged by the ring leader. No action has been taken against them. These are not one of the incidents, there are many like these but go un-reported. Courtesy, Our police and our respected leaders have a tendency to react only when any incidence is on national news, there courage grew un-checked. Some arresting have been made but I feel they are too little too late. Surprisingly the rise in these incidences matches with the rise in power of BJP in the state. This theory is supported by the fact that no action whatsoever has been taken against the culprit ( except for some arresting). Interestingly non of the major parties have asked for serious action against the hooligans, except for some comments on the ruling state government.
Does this mean that the parties feel, this is the verdict of the masses and it will hurt their lok sabha prospects if they go against this verdict?
If this is true then who is going the decide the law of the land? An organization run by hulligans in the name of Lord or the constitution written by our respected leader.
Are our leaders so weak that they can not think in the intrest of our country. If they feel what happened was right then bring a law for it. Do not let a group of people decide what is correct for a common and what is not.
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