Tag: Thailand

Sometimes there are so many small stories swirling around that I feel the need to gather them together in one larger compendium.  In the present case, some of them are updates to previous stories and some of them just don’t seem to fit anywhere else.

Item:

Irish Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton will publish legislation in the next year to provide for recognition of the acquired gender of transgender people.  The long-awaited report on legal recognition of transsexual people in Ireland was presented to the Cabinet on Wednesday.  Irish transgender rights law…or rather, the lack of same…was found to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights some time ago.

Etymology:

–1777 (in Cook’s “A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean”), “consecrated, inviolable, forbidden, unclean or cursed,” explained in some English sources as being from Tongan (Polynesian language of the island of Tonga) ta-bu “sacred,” from ta “mark” + bu “especially.”  But this may be folk etymology, as linguists in the Pacific have reconstructed an irreducable Proto-Polynesian * tapu, from Proto-Oceanic * tabu “sacred, forbidden” (cf. Hawaiian kapu “taboo, prohibition, sacred, holy, consecrated;” Tahitian tapu “restriction, sacred;” Maori tapu “be under ritual restriction, prohibited”). The noun and verb are English innovations first recorded in Cook’s book.

—Etymology online

The word itself (taboo) is used in more than one signification. It is sometimes used by a parent to his child, when in the exercise of parental authority he forbids it to perform a particular action. Anything opposed to the ordinary customs of the islands, although not expressly prohibited is said to be “taboo”.

–Herman Mellville, Typee

Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited under law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other taboos result in embarrassment, shame, and rudeness. Although critics and/or dissenters may oppose taboos, they are put into place to avoid disrespect to any given authority, be it legal, moral and/or religious.

—Wikipedia

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

–William Hazlitt

Tonight at 6PM Eastern Time, WWL Radio!!!!!

Gottlieb and Diane G. will be live and in color (or is that off color?) on WWL radio tonight at 6pm Eastern Time to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective.

Hear the Unreported & Under Reported Headlines stories you should be paying attention to, from US Politics, to the farthest reaches of the Earth by the WWL coalition of subversion: undermining the PTB by speaking Truth to Power!!!!

The Senate gives us a Permaform, rather than reform bill, making economic apartheid permanent. The color/apartheid movement in America is strong, despite the Elite’s grab, and Mexican is the new Nigger of us all.

The PTB lie to us about the Oil Disaster; trying desperately to hide the Gulf under a floormat.

Meanwhile, the rest of the World is in upheaval: The Koreas, Iran and Thailand…. and our leaders are swimming ass deep in it all; trying to find the edge to keep the upper hand.

What a news cycle!

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^{Haad Rin, Koh Phangan by Manfred Werner  (Wikimedia Commons)}

Remember this?

Back in September 2006, Bruce Schneier wrote about the The ID Chip You Don’t Want in Your Passport in the Washington Post:

If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it’s not set to expire anytime soon. If you don’t have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don’t want one of these chips in your passport…

RFID chips don’t have to be plugged in to a reader to operate…

The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: …

^Continued…