Blackbirding refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on the sugar cane plantations of Australia and Fiji.
The blackbirding schooner Daphne was seized by the HMS Rosario in 1869, and its passengers freed
Those ‘blackbirded’ were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the pearling industry in Broome, local Aboriginal people were blackbirded from the surrounding areas, including aboriginal people from desert areas.
Not long ago, prostitutes were restricted to offering their services on seedy street corners or in shady bars, or through oblique ads in the back pages of alternative newspapers.
Craigslist-erotic-services
Now many have gone high-tech, taking their businesses online. Internet sex ads now populate supposedly clean and family-friendly commercial zones with thinly veiled solicitations—and create an environment where sex workers, their clients and even innocent bystanders can find themselves in serious danger. Read the rest of this entry »
The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, tightens documentation rules for entry into the U.S. from Canada, requiring everyone to have passports or special driver’s licenses. Read the rest of this entry »
Just listen to the jerkoffs over at Taser Int’l as they attempt to build hollywood EXCITEMENT from police brutality!! What a bunch of fucking ignorant morons. But HEY! – They’re making MONEY, money money money money…. Hahahahahahaha!!! It’s the AMERICUN WAY!!
Frozen in time like a stalactite
Dripping icicles of frosty white
Left to feed off stagnant water
In this cave of Chinese torture
It is so cold down here in this blood-lit den
And the silence screams like a thousand men
Echoes bouncing around my head
In this solitude with which I’m fed
I am so tired in here though I dare not sleep
My stalactite heart in my soulless keep
Dreading the emptiness which I deplore
Continuing to seep on the limestone floor
And so I weep amidst the slaughter
The hanging knife, the devil’s daughter
And so I hang my head in sin
And never shall I let you in
OTTAWA – An international human rights report fingers the RCMP use of Tasers, noting that the controversial stun guns are the subject of a public inquiry in Canada and that six people died last year after being stunned by police. Read the rest of this entry »
love is coming.
love is coming to a funeral near you.
lonely roads are lonely roads by definition.
no one else is there.
recumbent velocipedes/
now that’s a lonely road.
‘67 dodge dart with an eight track
RUN THRU THE JUNGLE
RUN THRU THE JUNGLE
AW DON’T LOOK BACK
ditches
cornfields
harmonicas
give me a taste
a taste of that strawberry hill
a taste of that fidelity
innocent fidelity
Hot new offbeat international talk show brings the world closer to you.
Former “Queen of Skypecasts” launches her spicy new * QUEEN OF NORWAY LIVE * program today. Whether talking with Japan’s Geisha or France’s painters, your Queen assures she will ask all the questions you want answers to…
Once a year, one particular street in this sleepy town becomes red from an ankle-deep tomato juice river, which flows with flip-flops, t-shirts, beer cans, and the occasional Afro wig. The event is called La Tomatina and is the world’s largest tomato fight.
Buñol, which is a one-hour train ride from Valencia, has been hosting La Tomatina since 1945. There are various theories about how it began. Some say a couple of friends got into an argument at a local restaurant, which eventually turned into a food fight. Others believe it began as an anti-Franco protest. And still, another explanation is that the tomato war began between two opposing groups of youths: Think the Socs and the Greasers from the book “The Outsiders.”
Regardless, what began as the flinging of a few tomatoes in a quiet and unassuming town, has grown into an annual festival on the last Wednesday of every August, to which nearly 20,000 white-shirt-wearing warriors flock.
"The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered ( moved, seconded carried and minuted ) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices"
-- C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]
from The Screwtape Letters
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Mr. Anonymous® enjoys long walks on the beach. Naked. In the moonlight. With firearms and fudge. "As the host, co-producer and co-writer of a weekly two hour-long talk show, there is little time left for the simple pleasures in life"
"You are talking to a leftist. I believe in the redistribution of wealth and power in the world. I believe in universal hospital care for everyone. I believe that we should not have a single homeless person in the richest country in the world. And I believe that we should not have a C.I.A. that goes around overwhelming governments and assassinating political leaders, working for tight oligarchies around the world to protect the tight oligarchy here at home."
Virgin Brain
Virginbrain is a blog by Richard Derks. Feel free to leave a comment, to react. I don’t mind it if you like to annoy me. Of course I prefer a lick every now and then
WikiLeaks
The controversial “uncensorable, anonymous whistleblowing” website based currently in Sweden
'Her dress was split to the frontiers of decency and was so tight you could see what she was thinking" -- Sebastian Horsley
"The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything"
-- Oscar Wilde
What is the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has limits. - Albert Einstein
"Never regret growing older, as it is a privilege denied to many !"
"Love the life you live. Live the life you love." -- Bob Marley
"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver." –Gandhi
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." -- Oscar Wilde
»Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not gonna make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you've felt that way.«
-CHARLES BUKOWSKI
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." ~Dr. Seuss
“Abundance comes from making others better off.” — Anonymous
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
-- Steve Jobs
'Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions"
-- Edgar Cayce
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"Every day, in every little way, Scientology is changing me for the better." -- Susan Meister on 01/09/1971
On 06/25/71 she was found with a bullet in her head.
'Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable' --Sydney J. Harris
"You must have LONG term goals to keep you from being frustrated by short term failures."
-- Charles C. Noble
Sex won't make him love you, and a baby won't make him stay. -- Your Mom!