I had a high sugar intake and was looking for ways to drain or cut out the sugar content in my diet when I came across an article which said that a teaspoon of cinnamon every day in a cup of tea helps cut down the blood sugar level ... So I tried and it worked. My sugar level is now a very low 101. For those who bake their own apple pies, just add in a topping of cinnamon onto the pie and bake it. It's an easy way to enjoy an apple pie dessert!
Dick Cheney shot a turkey on Thanksgiving Day. But I believe waxed ducks and gobbling geese in Istanbul are not very amused.
And I will tell you why. Few people actually like Dick Cheney. His fat lugubrious unsmiling face on TV reminds one so much of a Richard Nixon. Both were corrupt or had sneaky ways of getting their own agenda done. Richard Nixon on Watergate. And Dick Cheney in Halliburton and its energy supply during the Iraq war.
If there's one thing I've learnt as an officious bystander from Thailand looking into the American landscape, it's this : corruption in politics starts slowly, and is seldom discovered till decades later, when all breaks lose. Thaksin was unceremoniously removed from power despite being a billionaire, despite being prime minister, despite having a perpetually smiling face, unlike dull-witted Dick Cheney. His sudden fall in 2006 is a stark reminder that even the greatest of politicians can fall suddenly if the public became aware of their seedy deals - either with the Mafia or with a group of people who use the Mafia for their own purposes, in order to prevent their own crimes from being discovered.
Since Dick Cheney can't even hold a rifle straight when he shoots, and since he always seems to be in dubious deals with energy companies after earning millions, I wish him a good fat turkey for Thanksgiving. I hope he doesn't choke on Idaho potatoes and green peas and the brown gravy he slurps up! I hope one day the truth about Halliburton and Dick Cheney's influence on George Bush to get them involved in providing energy deals during the Iraq war as the sole provider would one day come to the fore.
If it doesn't, it means that even a great democracy like America has to find crucial nuts and bolts to prevent their presidents and vice-presidents from using their influence in order to get their own companies or associates involved in billion dollar projects during a war or in the pursuance of American interests.
If all of us could have just one turkey for Thanksgiving and be satisfied with its plump juicy flesh, I think the world would be a lot better. We don't need two turkeys for Thanksgiving, do we, Mr Dick Cheney?
Dubious deals and dubious shots in the dark of the Rose Garden.
Three cheers for democracy, Mr EM Forster, but none for corruption, and none for nepotism!!
It is indeed disgusting to see so many corrupt regimes in the world, both in the West and in the Orient.
As somebody who has mixed blood, I am not taking sides.
Democracy was first invented by the Greeks by the way, more than 2,000 years ago - and was not a peculiarly American invention, as Americans like to contend.
Socrates, the greatest of the Greek philosophers, was forced to drink a poisonous drink, hemlock, for 'corrupting the youth of Athens.' Socrates was not corrupting the youth of Athens or anybody for that matter. He was questioning the corruption of the so-called democrats of his day, the leaders of Athens. He was questioning their war policy against Sparta, and their nepotism. He was raising questions about impropriety and integrity and double standards - in the same way most of us raise the questions today with our leaders. Unfortunately, there was much at stake for the democratic leaders of his day. Status and the gilt-edged swords of power and fame were more important to them than serving their people. They loved the togas of fashionable dress and rich tradition, they loved being seen strutting about the Acropolis as wise men. Socrates questioned their vanity, and being a blunt person, this did not go down iwth them. He had to be killed. He had to be warned to remain quiet. Ironical, isn't it, considering they were democrats.
In my previous blog entry, I raised questions about the CIA involvement in the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Not being an American citizen, I do not fear being given a goblet of hemlock! After all, the Bush administration has made a mess of the invasion of Iraq. Whether George Bush considers the fall of Iraq as the fall of Great Babylon and therefore justified because it is a Biblical prophecy in the Book of Revelations, I do not know. But the reasons for the invasion of Iraq were not clearly given. Saddam Hussein and the perpetration of biological weapons as a threat? To whom? To Israel or to America? Why couldn't the Americans or the CIA hire gunmen to assassinate Saddam instead, by luring him out to Liberia or Kuwait or Pakistan or Iran itself? Why couldn't they use a Middle Eastern gunman, the same way the Russians used a Turk to attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul 11? After all, there is evidence that the CIA used Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate Kennedy and then hired Jack Ruby to kill Oswald to prevent Oswald from bleating the news to the world at large. Ruby himself was then mysteriously done away with. Kennedy's brain was never found. The military doctors did the autopsy, not civilian doctors. The autopsy report was deliberately blurred to prevent speculation from arising. But the fact that both Oswald and Ruby died mysteriously and the fact that the Warren Commission's report was denounced by many as inadequate and poorly done, the fact that the government has refused to do a thoroughly independent investigation free from Republican and Democratic bias itself is reason enough to doubt the true authenticity of American democracy.
The fact that both Abraham Lincoln and JFK were assassinated after they wanted to issue debt-free US currency independent from the Federal Reserve Board is itself alarming and raised questions about who really controls the money supply and economic policy in America - the Federal Reserve Board or Congress and the American president.
It is also now understood that both the CIA and shipping magnates like the late Aristotle Onasis felt threatened by JFK's pacifist policies and desire to impose taxes on foreign ships in American ports. Liberian shipping lines were virtually owned by American billionaires like Aristotle Onasis who used to smuggle drugs into Argentina under the guise of importing tobacco. The Mafia controlled the drug smuggling activities in American cities like Detroit and Chicago and New York. Drugs couldn't be imported legally in bulk into America - but they could be siphoned from ships under a cover of respectability so that all looked well on the so-called Western front.
So the CIA could act blur and pretend that Aristotle Onasis was a great liberal with a great love for truth and liberty. And Onasis could use that to make billions, and he did. And Lyndon Johnson, who hated JFK's pacifist policies and apparently his Catholicism and wanted to be president, gave the CIA leeway to invade Cuba's Bay of Pigs [itself an odd title for such an odd operation]. George Bush Sr was in charge of the CIA's covert invasion. But the Bay of Pigs operation was a fiasco. It was a complete and bizarre failure and Kennedy then fired the then CIA boss Andrew Dulles for incompetency, not knowing his 'advsor' was none other than Lyndon Johnson himself!
Few people know of the depth of deceit that surrounded the murder of JFK. Few Americans seem to realise that the Federal Reserve Board is a board of powerful American bankers that can actually dictate American foreign policy towards the Middle East - after all, they issue currency notes by the millions, not the American president or Congress.
America today is in debt by about 7 trillion dollars. The American economy is in fact bankrupt literally. The American dollar has no real value. How can it have any value if American budget is in perpetual deficit? Do Americans have the courage to demand an end to hypocrisy and democracy by bombs? Do Americans realise that their popularity is virtually zero now - at an abysmal level never seen before in its history? Do Americans realise that even if they consider themselves great democrats, few people in Europe and Asia consider them or their style of democracy superior to theirs? How many countries in the world have governments that are controlled virtually by private international bankers who have much leeway in dictating practically the foreign policy of the country?
How many Americans have heard of the bizarre New World Order and Freemasonry from which it derives its devious ideology of world domination through the possession of wealth, gold and weaponry?
Aristotle Onasis did not really love Jacqueline Kennedy. He remained madly in love with his only true love, Maria Callas, till he died in 1975, broken hearted after the death of his son in an air crash. Jackie Kennedy knew she was only a tool to hide his dark deceit in being party to the murder of her beloved husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the most popular president in American history, and perhaps the most tragic figure in American politics in the last century.
America's boast that it is a citadel of democracy is an idle boast. Nobody respects America today for its foreign policy blunders and for its stupidity in Iraq. Thousands of poor Iraqis have been killed. American soldiers have raped and murdered innocent Iraqis, filming them on video as little better than naked animals. The world saw those videos. The world would remember those images where an American female soldier forced an Iraqi man to masquerade naked before her lustful eyes and filmed his bareness for the world to see - to mock and laugh about. Do you think any Iraqi would forget that humiliation?
Henry Kissinger has said that Iraq is in a civil war situation. He is perfectly right. Whether America remains in Iraq or not is no longer an issue. The invasion of Iraq or Great Babylon was ill conceived and prodded on by a foolish Dick Cheney, whose dubious dealings with Haliburton prompted him to recommend it as the sole energy provider for the Iraq war without a tender. Having worked for Haliburton and earned millions of dollars when he left to become vice president of the world's greatest democracy, he earned the wrath of Americans and millions worldwide when he evaded questions regarding the appointment of Haliburton for the war. And to make matters worse, he shot his own lawyer in a bizarre shooting incident, mistaking him for a quail! That itself shows what strange silly characters dominate American politics today.
If the truth about JFK and Dick Cheney's corruption is never exposed, America can not consider itself any better than a Third World country with its equally corrupt political systems hiding the truth. Democracy to function must function with the Truth being exposed as easily as the sun rises - every day for an election term - of four years. Once deceit and greed and corruption under the cover of chastity and idealism is allowed to rear its ugly head in American politics, it would be very difficult for a noble idealistic American president to actually dictate foreign policy in an intelligent way. Nobody in Europe or Orient who is a thinking person would accept that America is a superior democracy, or that the American people are superior intellectually.
Not any more.
I have always wondered who shot John F Kennedy. Although I am not American, I find his assassination very cruel.
For instance, what part did the CIA play in his assassination? Was the Mafia involved? Was George Bush Sr, who was working in the CIA at that time and oversaw the Bay of Pigs invasion feel threatened by the young Catholic upstart who was about to withdraw from Vietnam, and who had a pacifist policy, who was also about to clean up the CIA and splinter it into a thousand pieces for its Roswell debacle - who was not in favour of the invasion of Cuba in the first place?
Having studied ancient history, I've always been an admirer of Greece and its civilization and what it has given us : the most important of which is the ideal democracy.
I admire Socrates most of all among the Greek philosophers, and in these cynical times, perhaps it is wise to contemplate what true democracy is. Is it the right to speak without fear the concerns of a society and what is troubling us as citizens of a very wicked world, or is the right to express oneself freely at all times, but only during the election period? Or is it the right to cast a vote for a new government, a right that can be exercised only once in four years, in an atmosphere of absolute silence?
Is democracy as it is practised in America and in the Orient a tribute to a great martyr like Socrates who died for the Truth as he saw it, without flinching away from it? Or is it little better than an overused condom with a nice latex label, one of millions found floating in a bizarre sea of sin and scandal? Are democracies today filled with corrupt politicians? What are we as ordinary citizens doing to obliterate corruption from our electoral process? Is corruption more rampant in the Orient or does it happen in America as well?
Is Truth important - and if it is not seen to be practised today, is there a need to relook at the entire bizarre way democracy is practised today, and tolerated by a bewildered confused world?
Are we no better than slaves to a system that instead of offering us a better and more prosperous life today?
Where is the nobility and grandeur of vision of the ancient Greeks who dreamt up this concept of allowing the citizens to vote in their own leaders and exercise their liberty to speak in the Acropolis without fear today?
Do we do something about it - do we make movies about it - or do we accept that Mortal Man has become a victim of his own vanity and greed and hypocrisy?
