Iceland

Where every country in the world has, in the CIA World FactBook, a historical introduction, economic and geographical information, demographic data and reference to transnational issues, and so forth, the Iceland page simply invites you to look at 39 photos. 

But maybe the number 39 is a secret code; this is the CIA after all. 

James Joyce uses the number prolifically in Finnegan's Wake; could this be a clue? Edward Snowden, do you have any information on this? 39 is a significant number after all. It precedes 40 by 1, and 40 was the number of years Moses spent in the wilderness, the number of days Jesus spent in the wilderness; even more importantly the number of players a major league baseball team is allowed to have in its squad. 39 is what you get if you add the first five prime numbers, 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13, and also what happens if you multiply the first and last of those. Only three other integers share these properties (10, 155, and 371 if you really want to know). And what if you add powers? 3¹ + 3² + 3³ = 39. This must be it. The word “powers” is the cryptic clue. But which powers? Iceland is generally linked to Greenland. Can the third be Canada? Or is it, can it be, must it be, surely not…Russia? What is this CIA page really alluding to? Is the Kremlin poised to invade Reykjavik, take over its printing presses, and re-issue John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps” in audio form, or perhaps the church’s “Thirty-Nine Articles” as a movie, with Queen’s “39” from “A Night at the Opera” as the soundtrack, and Freddie Mercury wearing Roy Campanella’s baseball jersey. And if so, is Mossad involved (the International Zionist Conspiracy can never be counted out of any serious spy plot) – there are, after all, precisely 39 melachot, or actions that cannot be performed on the Sabbath, so are the Russians, or is the CIA itself, seeking to making a Jewish Caliphate in Iceland (now I get it – as the Jews were offered Uganda as a home after the Holocaust, Iceland is to be offered to the Palestinians, but first the place will have to be made warmer for them, which explains the conspiracy to engender global warming).

Why am I not writing anything serious about Iceland? Come on, do you really need to ask that question? They are actually very nice photos. Number 6 has an amazing rainbow (the ones in 9, 10 and 11 are too hazy). 14 may be a foolish error by the CIA that could lead to someone’s resignation, as it adds weight to the belief that Man has never yet been to the moon, but faked the entire adventure here, in Iceland. 17 is the one to look at though (see illustration on the left); it appears to suggest that the ancient Icelandic Eddas, the great national epic, are based on a geological map of Iceland – you can see the eye and the mouth of the dragon very clearly, and its multiple feet that are made of calcified fishes. Have you noticed (you who took the trouble to look anyway) that there is absolutely no ice, anywhere, in Iceland?


Marks For: 6

Marks Against: 6



You can find David Prashker at:
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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press

Hungary

At the end of September 2014, when I sat down to write this entry, my inclination was to leave it blank, because of the risk that anything posted online about Hungary would become subject to an Internet Tax that was about to be introduced. An Internet tax is similar to the Restaurant tax that exists in the USA, where bar, café and restaurant owners bill you for the food that you have eaten and the drinks consumed, but not for the staff who prepare and serve it; they do not bill you for these, as they do not pay them; it is not their responsibility to pay them; it is you, the customer, who is expected to pay them, with a gratuity as it is still called - gratuity comes from the Latin "gratis" and means "without charge" or "free", as in "voluntary", though apparently Americans are unaware of this - though in fact the amount is normally included in your bill and, unless you look carefully, generally also offered in the form of advice elsewhere on the bill, so that you can pay it twice. Internet tax, like Restaurant tax, is categorised as "con", "swindle" and "scam" in most dictionaries, though strangely the Restaurant tax is the one tax that Americans never try to avoid paying (a sentimental nostalgia for the morality that used to exist in that country, from the days before AynRandism eliminated altruism and overthrew Judeo-Christian values).

However, just before October 2014 came to an end, the Hungarian leaders realised the damage to their re-election hopes that would be done by introducing such a tax, and calculated that the income from it now was not worth the loss of income later (most tax revenues in Hungary end up in the pockets of the leadership eventually), and so this "valuable contribution to the development of culture and civilised society" has been dropped, and an entry in this blogbook may safely be written.

Hungary is a former participant in the Soviet Union, whose voluntary inclusion was so highly regarded in the Kremlin that, for their 1956 membership renewal celebrations, the Kremlin sent its entire military to the march-past. Prior to this, Hungary had been a kingdom for a thousand years, though latterly it was associated with Austria as Austro-Hungary, and note that Austro comes first in that term, and Hungary second. The re-drawing of the maps of the world by the victors in World War 1 reconstituted Hungary behind somewhat reduced borders – a mere 39% of its former territory being retained, which meant somewhat less than half of its population. Then came the Soviet era, when it really didn’t matter anyway, we are all global comrades now, that kind of thing…

Hungary's decision to remove the barbed-wire fence along its border with Austria was hailed in newspapers and western Parliaments as "the first tear in the iron curtain", a phrase I feel the need to question, as a tear is a tear, but a tearing down is a tearing down, and anyway no one shed any tears when it happened, including the Hungarian Communist Party, because when the rest of the Iron Curtain disintegrated and it became the Republic of Hungary, guess who carried on running the show; though to be fair they did agree to elections in 1990, and accepted with dignity when they were torn apart by the voters. This was actually an astute move. Trying to build a country, and especially an economy, from the zero in which Moscow had left Hungary, was like trying to scale the Carpathian mountains on a velocipede; after years of dismal effort, that first freely elected government was just as freely diselected, and the Socialist Party came to power – with, how odd, most of the members of the old Communist Party in its ranks. The back-and-forth from left to right has gone on ever since, as has the gradual tendency towards Europe – Hungary joined NATO in 1999 and the EU four years later. Comrade Putin is well aware of these facts. Fortunately for Hungary, there are issues in the Crimea, Ukraine and Georgia occupying Comrade Putin at the moment, so another march-past in Budapest is probably still a decade or two away.

There is much more to Hungary, thankfully, than just Stalin, Kruschev and Putin. There is also the music of Franz Liszt and Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and the writings of Antal Szerb, who wrote one of the strangest works of great literature anywhere in the world ("Journey by Moonlight" is its title), and Imre Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, but of whom no one in the West has even heard, and this despite the splendid work of English translator Tim Wilkinson to make him better known. Speaking of Jews, Hungary also hosts the largest synagogue in Europe, and also the largest medicinal bath in Europe, the third largest church in Europe, the second largest abbey in the world, the second largest Baroque castle in the world, and the largest early Christian Necropolis outside Italy, all of which may suggest why Hungarians were not all that excited about becoming part of the atheist Soviet Union.


Marks for: 6

Marks against: 4

You can find David Prashker at:
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http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press

Howland Island

Louisiana was named for the French Emperor and Maryland for the English Queen, Rhodesia for the explorer who discovered it and Greenland for its ice; Howland Island was named for the lookout in the crow's nest of the good ship "Isabella", an American whaling vessel under the command of Captain George E. Netcher of New Bedford, who sighted the island on September 9th 1842, and wrongly assumed that nobody until then knew of its existence. In fact, several whaling ships had already sighted it, including Captain Daniel McKenzie, also of New Bedford, who recorded doing so in December 1828 with his whaler the "Minerva Smyth", but did not name it, because it was already named, as Worth Island, after Captain George B. Worth, who discovered it in the Nantucket whale ship "Oeno" in 1822 and did not have the good grace to name it for the lookout who first saw it, but did what most bosses do, and took the credit and the glory for himself.

Worth Island it may have been, but Howland Island became its formal name when, on February 5th 1857, Alfred G. Benson and Charles H. Judd landed there in smallboats from the Hawaiian schooner Liholiho, which was under the command of Captain John Paty; they raised the American flag, and claimed the territory in the name of the American Guano Company of New York, by erecting a small house and "leaving various implements of business." The two remained, with a number of "native labourers" (native to Hawaii that is) until the 26th, filling the smallboats with as much guano as they could manage.

The Liholiho (the name means "glowing" in Hawaiian and was the epithet for the island's second king, Kamehameha II) was also responsible for naming and claiming Jarvis Island and Baker Island on that voyage, shortly after which The Great Guano-Digging Operation began, not quite on the scale of gold-prospecting in the Yukon or oil-exploration among the Beverly Hillbillies, but in the guano-digging world the rivalry between the American Guano Company and the United States Guano Company was equivalent to Apple versus Microsoft or McDonalds versus Burger King, and let's be honest, guano is guano. 

And what, I hear you ask, is guano? The word is properly wanu, in the Quechua language of the Andes mountains, but rendered in Spanish with a guttural "g" as guano, and it refers to the excrement of seabirds, cave-dwelling bats and virtually any other winged creature that flies in the region, including the Bar-Tailed Godwit and the Baseball-Glove-Throated Pelican, but not the Twin-Engined Lockheed Electra, which cannot make the journey. Worth, or Howland, was an uninhabited atoll that had for millennia provided a wildlife toilet in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a service station stop-over for the annual migration. Millennia of accumulated bird-shit is also an accumulation of natural minerals whose qualities are extremely useful; very high quantities of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, all of which make for top quality fertilisers; and this was the start of the epoch of the intensive farming industry, but still before the invention of artificial feeds, nurturers and composts, so guano was a godsend. Such vast quantities of guana were mined by those two US companies - and of course, once they heard about it, British pirates had to get in on the act as well - that within fifty years guano had become an endangered species, and the booming industry crashed.


And that would probably have been the last mention of Howland Island in the history of the world, but for an extraordinary woman named Amelia Earhart, whose attempt to fly around the world, single-handed, following the line of the equator, in precisely that Twin-Engined Lockheed Electra mentioned earlier, ended with her disappearance on July 2nd 1937, somewhere over Nikumaroro atoll in Kiribati. Earhart was heading for Howland Island, accompanied by her navigator Fred J. Noonan, to use its human toilet facilities and to refuel her plane; what happened is still a subject of much fascination and enquiry among journalists, scientists and airplane enthusiasts. What is known goes something like this:

At that time the Americans were attempting to colonise the atoll, the first potential residents arriving in March 1935, on the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter "Itasca". Among other priorities, they established a very primitive airfield, named Kamakaiwi Field in honour of one of those first residents. In March 1937, when Amelia's global circumnavigation approached its final stages, heading east over the Pacific before returning to ground zero in America, a ship named the "Shoshone" was dispatched to Howland, with equipment and labourers to complete the airfield in a hurry, under the supervision of one Robert Campbell. Amelia was in Honolulu, waiting to make the next stage of the journey, and would have taken off on March 19th, except that she crashed the plane while trying to do so, and had to stay while it was being rebuilt. By June the airfield at Howland was ready, and Amelia and Fred were on Oahu, "The Gathering Place", the third largest of the Hawaiian Islands, ready to head for Lae in New Guinea, the next service station before Howland Island. They left Lae on July 2nd, but never arrived at Howland Island. For several weeks ships combed the area, but the only trace of the Lockheed that has yet been found is a piece of aluminium picked up on Nikumaroro atoll in 1991. Researchers at TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), have authenticated the piece, which was a patch of metal installed on the Electra during Amelia's eight-day stay in Miami, the fourth stop on the outward part of her journey. Amelia never reached Howland Island in body, but she is there in spirit: Earhart Light, a day beacon near the middle of the west coast, was named in her memory.

Amelia's Electra, with an arrow to indicate the part that dropped like guano over Nikumaroro atoll

You will be able to read much more about Amelia when my novel "A Journey In Time" is published in 2016. In the meanwhile, you can listen to Joni Mitchell's splendid tribute to Amelia by strumming the link on Joni's name.

Howland Island, to add one last piece of information. was established as a National Wildlife Reserve in 1974.


Marks For: 1937

Marks Against: 0





You can find David Prashker at:
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http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
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http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press

Hong Kong

.

The Chinese will unquestionably protest that Hong Kong is not a country, but a special administrative zone within mainland China, and therefore should not be included in this list. Well, tough, you Chinese. I'm including it.At the time of writing (November 2014), we have just entered the start of the second month of student protests against the decision by the Chinese authorities that Beijing will choose the candidates for the forthcoming elections, though these elections will still be entirely democratic, as the people will be welcome to choose which chosen candidate is elected no different really from voting in Britain or the United States, where you get the candidates who the leaders of the political wings of the lobbying groups decide. In the blue corner, a representative of the oligarchy of the People’s Republic, wearing a blue tie; in the red corner, a representative of the oligarchy of the People’s Republic, wearing a red tie; in the green, yellow, orange and lilac corners…choose, good citizens, choose, we are fulfilling our commitment to democracy, to “one country, two systems”, made when we persuaded that nasty little Fascist Margaret Thatcher to sell out the people of Hong Kong to us. “Sell out”? Did you use the phrase “sell out”? You are a corrupt and disgraceful man, Mr Prashker, and we have just found $450m (the Chinese currency; 1 Yuan is worth about 16 American cents; Hong Kong still uses the Hong Kong dollar, which is worth about seven and a half US dollars) in cash in a suitcase in your bedroom; we are fighting corruption with every backhander we can lay on it; you are sentenced to death with no appeal…

Hong Kong, for those of you who like to know these things, means "fragrant harbour", which is a far better choice of name than, say, Kuala Lumpur, which means "muddy estuary", or Boca Raton, which means "rat's mouth". Fragrant harbour is however a falsehood, because these days the estuary of the Pearl River is so badly polluted that "contaminated harbour" would be a much more accurate description. "Contaminated harbour" in Chinese is 污染的海港 according to my Google translator, pronounced, I think, wūrǎn dì hǎigǎng. If you have a better offering, please let me know. Suggestions already received include 不再免费 (bù zài miǎnfèi) and 这是英国的错 (zhè shì yīngguó de cuò), whose meanings you can enjoy looking up for yourself (you will enjoy them, I promise you).

Had I been writing this before 1997, when the British overseas territory of Hong Kong became the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, I would have spoken of a densely over-crowded but extraordinarily vibrant Asian economy, crammed onto a small group of islands, of which Hong Kong itself is the largest, though there are two hundred more dotted around the Kowloon Peninsula. I would also have mentioned that Hong Kong's Chinese speak Cantonese, though today Canton is pronounced Guangdong, so I guess they now speak Guangdongese, as opposed to the Mandarin of "mainland" China; and I also guess they won't be speaking it at all for very much longer, because Mandarin is the only form of Chinese approved in Beijing, though an attempt to try this out in 2010, by having some programmes on Hong Kong television in Mandarin, failed when nobody watched them because they were out on the street protesting against them - and amazingly, almost uniquely, the government backed down. There will probably be an interesting battle over language at some point in the future, because Malaysian Chinese is Cantonese, and Vietnamese Chinese is Cantonese, and all but a handful of the Chinese who live in Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States use Cantonese, so any attempt by Beijing to eradicate Cantonese, or even to have it globally renamed Guangdongese, is doomed to failure. Can the same be said of China's other world-imperialist ambitions, economic and otherwise? That is much harder to say.

And how long before Hong Kong’s status as a special zone is eliminated, and it becomes just another region of China’s global empire, oppressed, suppressed and repressed? Boo-choo, as they is Chinese. Boo-choo. 不久. Not long.



Marks For: 12 (before 1997); 2 (in 2015)

Marks Against: see my blog entry on China.



You can find David Prashker at:
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https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press

Honduras

There used to be a Spanish Honduras and a British Honduras, but when the colonial imperialists finally left, the latter became Belize and the former dropped the Spanish from its name, but retained it for its language. To find out what there is to know about any Central American country, where better to look than the CIA’s own “World Factbook”, a deliciously neutral portrait at all times (no, honestly, it really is). 

“Once part of Spain's vast empire in the New World, Honduras became an independent nation in 1821. After two and a half decades of mostly military rule, a freely elected civilian government came to power in 1982. During the 1980s, Honduras proved a haven for anti-Sandinista contras fighting the Marxist Nicaraguan Government and an ally to Salvadoran Government forces fighting leftist guerrillas. The country was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed about 5,600 people and caused approximately $2 billion in damage. Since then, the economy has slowly rebounded.” 

Can you get more neutral than that?

Whereas Wikipedia, that well-known bastion of ideological prejudice and narrow-minded, jaundiced bigotry, offers a radically different account that is by no means neutral:

“During the early 1980s, the United States established a continuing military presence in Honduras with the purpose of supporting U.S. Government support to El Salvador, the Contra guerillas fighting the Nicaraguan government, and also developed an air strip and a modern port in Honduras. Though spared the bloody civil wars wracking its neighbors, the Honduran army quietly waged a campaign against Marxist-Leninist militias such as Cinchoneros Popular Liberation Movement, notorious for kidnappings and bombings, and many non-militants. The operation included a CIA-backed campaign of extrajudicial killings by government-backed units, most notably Battalion 316.” 

Now is that not a libelous slander and a slanderous libel against the USA (not to mention its bad grammar and worse syntax)?

What we clearly need is balance, and where better to seek it than that most neutral of all media, the BBC?

“Military rule, corruption, a huge wealth gap, crime and natural disasters have rendered Honduras one of the least developed and least secure countries in Central America. Until the mid-1980s Honduras was dominated by the military, which enthusiastically supported US efforts to stem revolutionary movements in the region. Since then, civilian leaders have sought to curb the power of the military - with varying degrees of success. Some army officers have been charged with human rights abuses, but many have still to be prosecuted for violations committed in the 1980s. Honduran society is rife with economic inequality. Malnutrition, poor housing and infant diseases are widespread.” 

Balance! Do you call that balance? And to think that tax-payers are subsidising this stuff.

Where, where can one go for an honest account of this beautiful little country? I asked my younger daughter, who has been there twice. She smiled, reminded me that she had only seen a tiny fraction of the country because tourists were advised not to visit any others (even and including and especially the capital, Tegucigalpa, which by all accounts is a cross between Belfast in the 1980s, the Gaza Strip today, and Johnny Friendly's little empire in Hoboken in "On The Waterfront"), and said no more.

So I asked the globe-trotter girls, who have been everywhere, and nobody more dauntless:

"Travel in Honduras can certainly seem unsafe. The first thing that stood out to us was the amount of machine guns displayed publicly. Even in supposedly safe and heavily visited Copan, with visitors ranging from backpackers to retirees, the sheer amount of armed policemen and private security guards on the main square and parked in front of banks was unnerving. If there is this much police presence, we thought, why exactly do they need it? Is it only precautionary? Or should we have taken out a life insurance policy in addition to our travel insurance?"

And then I realised, that the only truly honest place to go is to ask Hondurans themselves. Human Rights Watch did exactly that, and came up with: 

"Honduras suffers from rampant crime and impunity for human rights abuses. The murder rate, which has risen consistently over the last decade, was the highest in the world in 2013. Perpetrators of killings and other violent crimes are rarely brought to justice. The institutions responsible for providing public security continue to prove largely ineffective and remain marred by corruption and abuse, while efforts to reform them have made little progress." 

No, more bias, more agenda-driven propaganda by lefties in the spoiled affluence of Manhattan. Honesty. I simply ask for honesty. So I tried Amnesty International, but frankly they are no better: 

"Human rights violations and abuses against human rights defenders, journalists, women and girls, LGBTI people, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino (peasant farmer) communities continued to be a serious concern. These violations took place in a context where impunity for human rights violations and abuses was endemic and where levels of organized and common crime were high."

Somebody, somebody, please, paint me a portrait of the real Honduras, its natural beauty, its fine and charming people, its ancient monuments. What about the government's own website, honduras.com?

"Welcome to Honduras!"

A much better start. This looks really promising.

"Honduras is a vibrant country, brimming with clear turquoise waters, pristine beaches, lush jungles, breathtaking mountains, challenging rivers, and fascinating ancient ruins."

Yes, this is what I was hoping to read. Only then they go and spoil it.

"In addition to these tourist destinations and popular attractions, the country offers opportunities for business and trade. San Pedro Sula's “tax free zone” allows international companies to manufacture goods at attractive rates. Located at the very center of the Americas, Honduras operates ports in San Lorenzo and Puerto Cortes, which provides a thoroughfare between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and expedites the transit of merchandise."

Why do Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the CIA and the BBC not tell us that Honduras is a tax-haven as well? Who are they protecting? What else are they trying to hide? Only the Honduras government itself can be fully trusted to reveal the full and honest truth. Go Honduras!

Marks For: minus 7

Marks Against: 11

You can find David Prashker at:
http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press

Holy See (Vatican City)

Originally known as the Roman Empire, it became the World Empire of Roman Catholicism in 313 CE, the year in which Constantine, the Western Roman Emperor, and Licinius, the Eastern Roman Emperor, signed the Edict of Milan, which guaranteed the rights of all religions, and brought to a close the so-called Age of the Martyrs, of whom Jesus was the first. This is ironic, because ten years later Constantine reunited the Roman Empire, and moved the seat of government to what had previously been called Byzantium, was now renamed Constantinople, and is today known as Istanbul, the city which for centuries was the heart of the Moslem Ottoman Empire.

Rome having been reduced to the size of a bowl of ashes by the Gothic invaders in 410 CE, church rule was re-established in the 8th century as the Stato della Chiesa or Papal States, and stayed that way for almost a thousand years, a world religious empire (the Holy See) but also a European secular empire (the Republic of St Peter), sharing headquarters in Rome, the latter with franchise outlets throughout Lazio, Umbria, Marche and part of Emilia-Romagna, as well as in Avignon in France.

About a half of that world empire had already been lost by the time that Italy came into existence in the 19th century - a consequence of Protestantism seceding from the union - so that what remains today is just 110 acres of land with a population of 842, established as a kind of Roman Ghetto by the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Beyond those narrow confines the Republic of St Peter has lost virtually all its secular authority, but within those narrow confines the Holy See rules on, with an estimated 1.2 billion people in the world counting themselves as its adherents.

The smallest state in the world is also the most economically prosperous, having run the most ambitious Ponzi scheme in history for 2015 years, and little sign yet that the rewards promised to investors are going to be fulfilled. Government is by oligarchy – all members of the oligarchy are required to live as eunuchs, though formal castration is no longer practiced - with the oligarchs themselves choosing their leader, who serves until death, though some leaders, known as Popes or Pontiffs, have been deposed, exiled, murdered or assassinated. Above the Pope stands a figurehead of the despotically monarchic type, known by the title God, who officially presides at meetings, but is generally silent, and has no formal vote. There is no Parliament, nor any need for one, as the leader has absolute power and all necessary legislation was agreed by Synod in the 4th century CE. 

The Human Rights record of the oligarchs is by some distance the worst in human history, the Holy See being responsible for establishing the policies through which were driven, and encouraging those who then carried out, the genocides of Mayan, Aztec, Inca, Arawak and other populations in South America, as well as the subordination of all other peoples in the region to what is called "the Will of God", though no formal Will has yet been found, and claims that he is dead are strenuously denied; and this despite the fact that, if we are simply carrying out the Will of God, then this is probate, and you don't do probate until the will-maker is dead.

Similar genocides in Africa and Asia, including the policy decisions behind the slave trade, as well as repeated acts of ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Europe, are also included in its catalogue of crimes, though support among the governments of the world suggest its leaders are unlikely to be called to the International Court of Justice very soon. Torture of "disbelievers" (the term used for those who refuse to invest in the Ponzi scheme) and "recanters" (those who initially did buy into the Ponzi scheme, but then refused to purchase an extended warranty) has been commonplace, and the stakes are often raised extremely high in the burning desire of the oligarchs to enlighten the masses through tongues of flame. Citizens of the Holy See, including ex-patriates, are easily recognized, as most like to wear the traditional amulet, a necklace from which hangs, in the shape of the letter T, the tortured corpse of a murdered Jew, though strangely he doesn’t look terribly Jewish.

The smallest nation in the world also has one of the greatest collections of art, scultpture and jewellery in the world, all located in one of the supreme architectural achievements, St Peter's Basilica, whose Sistine Chapel contains works by Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, and of course the Last Judgment by Michelangelo on the ceiling.

For those who are interested, yes, the Pope tweets (one assumes in his case that it is a Holy Dove); and yes, you can follow him on Facebook too (and this time, look at his profile picture, he clearly can't tell a white pigeon from a holy dove either).



Marks For: 3 

(at the Vatican City they do not use Marks, they use Stigmata. Marks tend to be superficial scratches and bruises, whereas the Vatican likes to go for the full Crucifixion, or at the very least a good burning on the rain-forest timber; the advantage of the latter, of course, is that it doesn't leave marks, so there is no forensic evidence)

Marks Against: X (which was ten to the original Romans, but interestingly enough now symbolises "an unknown number", and was also the shape of the cross in Roman times)

Why an X here? Because statistical records were not maintained during the period of the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas, nor slave-trafficking out of Africa, and therefore no number can be provided here, other than to state without fear of contradiction, even excluding the annual anti-Jewish pogroms and ultimate Holocaust, that between 50 and 100 million is a not-unreasonable estimate, though it is obviously a quite unreasonable fact of history. For President Obama's February 2015 comparison of radical Islam today with radical Christianity then, click here.

You can find David Prashker at:
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http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press

Heard Island and McDonald Islands

Do they sell hamburgers here? Well, if they do, they will be Australian hamburgers, because these are Australia’s little piece of the Antarctic, albeit two and a half thousand miles south-west of the mainland. Aussies call it HIMI, which is typical of the macho male Aussie (HERI, aka Sheila, doesn’t get much of a look-in down-under). There is really nothing else to say about the place, except penguins, volcanoes, and no, you cannot go there. And anyway, shouldn't Ronald spell his last name MacDonalds.

Surprisingly, the best information source on the unique ecology of the islands is UNESCO.


Marks for: 6

Marks against: 0

You can find David Prashker at:
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http://davidprashker.com/
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