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1. januar 2005
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Beer to water
After the disaster, Sri Lanka's largest beer-maker Lion Brewery quickly stopped making beer and is using its production power to make portable water for the survivors.
"We needed every hand because the packing of the water bottles had to be done manually," said Rahim. Beer bottling is 100 percent mechanized, but the executives found that if they ran the system mechanically, it would also paste the Lion Lager sign on the bottles.
"Even our managers got into the act and helped the staff to manually store the bottles in packages," she said.
More than one-third of Sri Lanka's coastline was devastated by the tsunami, and sea water contaminated many wells.
After the disaster, the demand for liquor has dropped considerably, Rahim said.
"But it is a wonderful feeling that we can make you happy with whatever we produce -- good water or good beer," she said.
In Sri Lanka, the relief effort has experienced the additonal trauma of flash floods caused by torrential rain.
7:52:02 PM 
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Judge refuses divorce because woman is pregnant
Now this is unhealthy judicial activism:
A Spokane woman trying to divorce her estranged husband two years after he was jailed for beating her has been told by a judge she can't get out of the marriage while she's pregnant.
The case pits a first-year attorney who argues that state law allows any couple to divorce if neither spouse challenges it against a longtime family law judge who asserts that the rights of the unborn child in this type of case trump a woman's right to divorce.
"There's a lot of case law that says it is important in this state that children not be illegitamized," Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine told The Spokesman-Review newspaper.
Further complicating things, Shawnna Hughes claims her husband is not the child's father.
Very medieval.
6:21:49 PM
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The jihadists and their useful idiots
Cristopher Hitchens on the jihadists and those who see them as some sort of well-deserved blowback against the west:
Below even the bin Laden level, however, there are those who insist that they prefer death to life, and who really mean it. Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction. It's amazing how many people refuse to see this. They persist in saying that it's a protest against something, or a reaction to some injustice. They are right to an extent: as long as there is a non-Salafist Muslim anywhere, or a Jew or Christian or rationalist, or an unveiled woman or a profane work of art, the grievance can never be appeased. Of course this does have something in common with fascism - "Death to the intellect! Long live Death!" was a favorite slogan of some Francoists: I think it was coined by General Quiepo de Llano - but even fascism could build an autobahn or design a rocket, while these primitives only want to steal enough technology to wreak devastation. So far, they have mainly brought down their own house (as in Afghanistan and now in Iraq) but we can't allow ourselves take too much comfort from that. However, there is some encouragement to be derived. The 1990s Islamist insurgency in Algeria, for example, was crushed partly because the GIA (which now seems to have gone out of existence) had no political demands and had more or less excommunicated all other Algerians as heretics. This same dead-end for jihad is perhaps being reached in Palestine and will be reached, if we stay intransigent, in Iraq also. What I keep saying is: they wish to be martyrs and we must help them to achieve martyrdom by every method at our disposal.
Read it all! Hat tip to Tim Blair for link.
It is notable that the most prominent terrorists were people who had no personal reason to be angry at the west, beyond their fantasies of offense to religious purity. People like Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Zarqawi, or the hijackers on 9/11-01, would have a reason to be thankful to the US and the west for its help, were they rational people.
I have no count on the number of times I've heard leftists argue that certain heavy-handed tactics in Afghanistan or Iraq will breed more terrorism. But there is not any evidence anywhere that terrorists are people with personal grudges. This is armchair pop-psychology that has nothing to do with reality. Personal grief does not fuel terrorism. Ideology does. And that is as true about the modern death cults of the islamofascists as it was about the Red Brigades or the Baader Meinhof communist terrorists in Europe in the 70s and 80s.
PS: Hitchens also delivers some scathing remarks about the Roman Catholic Church:
What's amazing about the degeneration of the Catholic Church is that, having been extremely dogmatic about some minor sins, such as divorce or contraception, it has asked for lenience and wiggle-room when it comes to a sin that any decent Atheist would die rather than even be suspected of: the rape and torture of children. This simply means that, like the mullahs who can't condemn suicide-murder, it has lost any claim it may have had to moral or spiritual authority. But this doesn't greatly affect me, since I never thought it had any such authority in the first place.
Unfortunately, to many people they do have such authority.
4:38:38 PM
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Happy new year folks!
2:35:48 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.02.2005; 02:16:20.
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