Monday, June 29, 2009

Coup D´etat in Honduras? Not, The Opposite, in fact

What makes Lula da Silva and Ahmajinehad say the same words?
Yeah, there´s a list:
a) A secret treat between Brazil and Iran
b) To minimize the killing in Iran
c) Yes! to show hypocrisy on Honduras

But it seems that some people keep their rationality...

hat tip: James de Meo
O'Grady: Honduras Defends Its Democracy - WSJ.com
Honduras Defends Its Democracy
Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.

*
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hugo Chávez's coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation's constitution.

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya's abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
[THE AMERICAS] Associated Press

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya's next move will be. It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya's foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. "We won't go backwards," one sign said. "We want to live in peace, freedom and development."

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. Earlier this month he hosted an OAS general assembly and led the effort, along side OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, to bring Cuba back into the supposedly democratic organization.

The OAS response is no surprise. Former Argentine Ambassador to the U.N. Emilio Cárdenas told me on Saturday that he was concerned that "the OAS under Insulza has not taken seriously the so-called 'democratic charter.' It seems to believe that only military 'coups' can challenge democracy. The truth is that democracy can be challenged from within, as the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and now Honduras, prove." A less-kind interpretation of Mr. Insulza's judgment is that he doesn't mind the Chávez-style coup.

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com


River Uniquely Cited on Bible is Found!

According to Genesis...: Ancient Geography: The Lost River of Eden and Recent Geological Discoveries
See it here too:
Ancient Geography: The Lost River of Eden and Recent Geological Discoveries
(cf. James Sauer, "The River Runs Dry: Creation Story Preserves Historical Memory" Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August (1996)

“A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good” (Gen 2:10-12).

“…in very far antiquity, just such a river once existed, and its long-dried course has been recently traced from its rise in the west Arabian gold-lands (in Havilah) east and east-northeast toward the head of the gulf, via modern Kuwait.” (Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2003).


Fig. 1 Map Showing Eden’s Long-lost River

Four rivers are mentioned in the narrative of the ordering of creation in Genesis 2, but as any commentary will tell you, only three are known. The commentaries, it turns out, will have to be rewritten.

Eden’s Pishon river, mentioned only in the Bible (Genesis 2:11), is said to have flowed “around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold...” Three other rivers which Genesis said were alongside the Pishon are known to us as the centers of the world’s earliest civilizations, but the Pishon was a complete enigma to readers for millennia, until recently. The earliest known civilizations, Sumer and Egypt, knew nothing of it, and these civilizations were flourishing over 1500 years before Abraham! Satellite imaging and later Space Shuttle echolocation revealed a pock-marked section of the desert caused by river stones which still lay buried deep under the desert sand. Blue is limestone, yellow-orange is desert sand; the pock-marked area in the yellow sand (below left) is caused by the influences of subterranean topography and wind on the desert sand. (the river was discovered by Farouk El-Baz of Boston University. Photo courtesy EDSAT, Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing).


Fig. 2 Satellite Image of the Lost Pishon River of Eden

The imagery also overturned the prevailing assumption of climactic stability since the end of the last ice age (ending c. 9000BC) held by a majority of ancient Near Eastern scholars until recently. It would appear, as James Sauer puts it, that Genesis contains some very ancient historical memory about ancient Near Eastern geography. How ancient? The presence of this river far predates the geography described by the Sumerians and the Egyptians, which are the earliest civilizations known to historians, yet its existence and location are just as they are found in the Bible.

This brings to mind an obvious question: where’s all that gold? It turns out that the gold of that land is good! The ancient river, it turns out, runs right by the best producing site in the world today. "Only one place in Arabia has such a deposit -the famous site of Mahd edh-Dhahab, the "Cradle of Gold." This mine, ancient and modern [it was re-discovered in 1932] currently produces more than 5 tons of gold a year. The mining site is located about 125 miles south of Medina, near the headwaters of the Kuwait River" (Sauer, op cit, p. 64).


Fig. 3 Gold Vain from Solomon’s Mine in Havilah.

“This quartz-sulfide-gold vein at Mahd edh-Dhahab is still mined today. The mine, which some identify as King Solomon’s mine (1 Kings 9:26–28), produces more than 5 tons of gold a year” (Sauer, op cit; Photo by Richard B. Carten).


Fig. 4 Arial Photograph of the Gold Mine at Mahd edh Dhahab (Eden’s Havilah) discovered in 1932)


Sunday, June 28, 2009

Brazil and Iran Strange Relations Unveiled

Google Tradutor
Brazil - The secret agreement with Iran in Brazil
Brazil helps Ahmadinejad to circumvent the sanctions imposed by the United States and the UN Security Council.


Thursday, June 25, 2009

on Perestroika Deception by Anatoli Golistyn (from Scribd)

Scribd is a very good tool to share large documents on the web without turning it into html or blog. You can upload a pdf, word document and share it to the world.

Sometimes I´ve found what I called "treasures": documents hard to find.
This is one of them: An analysis on the book "Perestroika Deception" by Master Soviet Defector Anatoli Golitsyn.
Check it out!

On Perestroika Deception by Anatoliy Golitsyn - Business & Law, terrorism, and deception
On Perestroika Deception by Anatoliy Golitsyn


On Perestroika Deception by Anatoliy Golitsyn


Monday, June 15, 2009

The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story

Swimming goes to Rome...

I have no new post for several week now. But don´t worry, I did not surrender nor drowned under the red tide.
It was just lots of work to do. I still have it, but I could stop for three days last week. I went to Rome.
Rome is beautiful, the traffic remembers me of Brazil. People are nice.
Ok, but there´s Berlusconi..
But the guy is rightist, no? Eco, ma non troppo.
He received Kadhaffi (the former? terrorist from Lybia) as a statesman last week...
See you.