inkbluesky

time for the big hat cajamarca peru

I used to have a friend that smoked a Meerschaum pipe. It was rather plain for a Meerschaum, nothing like the pipe art here, Meerschaum

“Meerschaum has been called Venus of the Sea, White Goddess, sepiolite, sea-foam or froth, the Aristocrat of smoking substances! It has been identified as hydrous magnesium silicate, an opaque white-gray or cream colored mineral of the soapstone family. It has been written as H4Mg;Si30 ,o, 3S .O^MgO^H^O, 2MgO, S,0;-14H20 and even Mg4(H;0)3(OH),SitO,5-3H;0! Whatever its composition, meerschaum is not the bone of the sepia or cuttle fish, the residue or fusion of decomposed sea shells, petrified sea foam or a clay composition. It is a mineral!

Stoning Women to Death

On . . . June 29, 2006, a court in the Islamic Republic of Iran sentenced Malak Ghorbany, a 34-year-old mother of two, to a brutal death by stoning after finding her guilty of adultery. . . . Two men who were found guilty of murder in the same court were only given jail sentences of six years. . . . The size of the stones used during the execution are required to be . . . not so large that they would kill a woman too quickly, nor so small that they would fail to cause serious injury or pain . — A letter, unanswered, to George W. Bush from John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, one of the nation’s premier civil liberties organizations. The part about the stones is from Article 104 of the Iranian penal code.

I read conservative blogs and magazines and it is not an exaggeration to say that they would see this as another rationale for bombing Iran. You know, bring them democracy at the end of a bomb like Iraq, that’ll teach’em to stone women. They wouldn’t pause for a moment to see the contradiction, that somehow it is better to die by a bomb with good intentions then be stoned to death by a people that have rejected The Age of Reason. Anyway there is a link to a petition to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the bottom of the article by Nat Hentoff for what good it will do. I wish I had the time to do a long post on how all fundamentalist religions make women into second class citizens.