Rain Gryphon

The Tubby Tyrant has gifted tractors to potato farmers. No word about any implements for them, and the farmers have to buy their own fuel. No phosphate fertilizer to be had anywhere either, since the fertilizer factory exploded four years ago and isn't yet repaired. Still, the lucky farmers are now expected to demonstrate their gratitude by reaping a record harvest.

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It's annoying to me that Reuters (and other news sources as well) keeps calling what's happening in Haiti "protests". When you're shooting off guns, and setting buildings on fire, that's rioting, at the very least.

It's beyond annoying that while American taxpayers are being asked to pay for the Kenyan expedition (which was Haiti's idea), the Haitians themselves have 500 million dollars to pay Venezuela for petroleum products.

So, in North Korea they have a "youth coal mine", where kids can prove their loyalty to the Tubby Tyrant by digging coal, all to advance the majesty of the Glorius North Korean People, as one naturally longs to do. One shaft had been closed as dangerous. They decided to re-open it, the better to hit their government-mandated production targets. Because it was dangerous, they decided to send only orphans to work in it, apparently without any training. You know what happened next.

This just breaks my brain. It's like they're trying, with desperate ingenuity and enthusiasm, to be the most over the top hellscape of a country imaginable.

I would honestly love to visit the place, but I know I'd never get out alive.

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The whole "let's send African police to Haiti" thing seems to have quietly died. I doubt that it's much of a loss, really.

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Lebanese Air Force is in such bad shape they're selling helicopter rides to raise operating cash. I *think* that's an ancient DeHavilland "Otter" parked in the background, for all that I can't find any website that says they operate those. And right behind that - is that the tail of a North American F-86 "Sabre" poking out? It certainly looks like it to me, although again, I can't find any documentation on the Lebanese having any, although pretty much everyone else in the Free World did. Perhaps it's at an air museum?

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Heh. In North Korea, if you accept your discharge from the Army, then it's off to the mines with you! Also, the mining ministry gets not only a list with the names of retiring soldiers, but also a list of 'their personal items', so you effectively get plundered as well as enslaved. That ought to increase military re-enlistments.

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Haiti has an opening for a new dictator. Who will claim the glittering prize? The picture of the soldiers guarding the Presidential Palace (set to guard the place *after* the assassination, of course) is a classic. Exactly one soldier is acting like he's on duty. The other four are slouching around, schmoozing, talking on the phone, etc. while the steps of their nation's house are covered in trash. Even if you're the one out of five with some sense of duty, what good does it do in a culture like Haiti's? This probably furnishes a clue as well as to why the assassins hired foreign mercenaries to do the job.

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Famine time again in Ethopia. Literally, during my lifetime, they happen about every fifteen years. And despite that, and despite what recurring famines should tell you about your country's population level, , they just keep packing more in.

I'm prolly going to Hell for laughing at this, but this is one of my all-time favourite pictures of the Beloved Leader. He seems to be literally rubbing his hands in glee. Soon, he will have enough synthetic lubricant to conquer the United States, and free us from the twin oppressions of capitalism and imperialism!

Meanwhile, the slave-labour dude on the left hasn't slept for the past 48 hours, terrified that the Tubby Tyrant will notice that half the bolts on that sealing flange have been stolen and sold for food, or that the maintenance guys carelessly got a splotch of blue paint on the output tube of the Glorious North Korean People's Lubricant-Making Machine.

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We've finally taken the common-sense step of declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as terrorists. IMHO, we'd have done better to have declared the Iranian government and all of its representatives as terrorists, and opened the festivities by raiding the UN and hauling Iran's guys off to Guantanamo, but this is a start.

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The Darktator has evidently declared that electrical power will be shut off at unannounced intervals for "maintenance", to prevent "blackouts".

Damn... O.o

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Insulting Species Names for Birds

Ducks - Dicks
Robins - Rottens
Rails - Fails
Grebes - 'Grebe' already sounds like some obscure insult
Swans - Swines
Loons - yeah...


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What is it like to live in a country where the telephone directory is a state secret? I can hardly even imagine that. It's like something from Kafka.

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Oh yes! :D