Rudy Carrera

Mark Steyn pokes a lot of fun at Rajendra Pachauri, a phony posing as a global warming expert who was caught not only peddling climate rubbish but engaging in a hypocrisy about as bad as Al Gore’s.

Please understand that the number quoted refers simply to those buried by government officials and aid workers, not to those still trapped in rubble. Please consider giving to your favorite charity in order to help. Mine is IOCC, but there are many more you can give to in order to help Haitians in need.

The BBC has more here.

Wicked though some of these despots may be, there’s something strangely attractive about weird leaders who develop a cult of personality. Whether it be Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-Il or the Duvalier Family who ruined Haiti, these guys have something that gets otherwise sensible people to follow them down into oblivion.

A good case in point would be the legendary Turkmenbashi, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who led Turkmenistan from 1991 until his death in 2006. He had his picture everywhere, had a gold monument erected for himself, and even wrote a supplement to the Quran that was required in every mosque in the country. Thankfully, the new leadership, led under Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, is shying away from some grotesque scenes of indulgence to something less obnoxiously autocratic.

A major symbol, an arch with a 246-foot, is about to be moved from the center of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s capital. Good riddance.

HT: BBC.

From Reuters’ Cairo Office:

New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt’s chief archaeologist said on Sunday.

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

“These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves,” Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

“If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king’s.”

He said the collection of workers’ tombs, some of which were found in the 1990s, were among the most significant finds in the 20th and 21st centuries. They belonged to workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.

Hawass had earlier found graffiti on the walls from workers calling themselves “friends of Khufu” — another sign that they were not slaves.

The tombs, on the Giza plateau on the western edge of Cairo, are 4,510 years old and lie at the entrance of a one-km (half mile)-long necropolis.

Hawass said evidence had been found showing that farmers in the Delta and Upper Egypt had sent 21 buffalo and 23 sheep to the plateau every day to feed the builders, believed to number around 10,000 — or about a tenth of Greek historian Herodotus’s estimate of 100,000.

These farmers were exempted from paying taxes to the government of ancient Egypt — evidence that he said underscored the fact they were participating in a national project.

The first discovery of workers’ tombs in 1990 came about accidentally when a horse stumbled on a brick structure 10 meters (yards) away from the burial area.

(Writing by Marwa Awad; Editing by Alison Williams and Michael Roddy)

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing to the world Abigail Carrera. My niece was born mid-day, and she is as healthy as can be! Mom and kiddo are doing fine, and I’m sure pictures will be forthcoming when the time is right.

Never let it be said that I don’t have a knack for running into adventure. First, I spent my first day going nuts from cramps thanks to leaving cold air on in my car after a three-hour drive. Then, my poor brother, suffering from sinus problems, snores his brains out, shorting my first opportunity in days to get a quiet night’s sleep. Now today, in between getting propositioned by a hooker and waiting for a VERY slow housekeeping department sending someone to clean my abode, we get to witness commotion at the Federal Courthouse here in Las Vegas, where some nut went and murdered a security guard and wounded a federal agent. We were supposed to go for a business meeting tomorrow, and still will, but I must say today’s events left me a bit weirded out!

You can see some video taken from a cellphone during the shooting courtesy of Yahoo!’s news site.

Shame on you if you’re reading this at midnight of the end of the decade. Go back to your bottle of champagne and your loved ones!

Friends, welcome to RudyCarrera.com. If you were kind enough to link to me in the past, I thank you for it, and I ask you to update your links, simply deleting the “/wp” from your address bar. The site will be taken down within the next few months so that I can make more sites for each subject.

I will no longer be writing about politics here unless it has something personal to do with me. I’m now writing at Young Gun Conservative, and will make the occasional foray into political commentary there. For those friends and family who have a more liberal bent, I’d stay away. You might throw up.

As for this site, I’ve decided that after blogging every single day of 2009 mainly on the ugliness of politics and war from a Conservative standpoint, I thought I’d lighten up this year and post things I think you might enjoy reading. I’ll still continue to write on other subjects on the other sides (see the Blogroll for those), though I figure I’d rather just post interesting links to my main Facebook site (see the “About” page for info on that). The other thing I’m trying to fool with is a plug-in called ‘Mingle’, which purports to turn my website into a social media place. It doesn’t yet support embedding of videos (boo) or music (double-boo), but it may work a bit better than Facebook’s activity stream for the time being. I’ll be checking with the Mingle folks about whether or not there will be embedding functions added to their upgrades or not.

Those of you who know me well (family, Lily, Kenji, Steve S., Peter, Andres, John G. and others) know what a weird, tough year this was. I went from my home in California in order to move to Colorado hoping to find a future for myself after struggling with education cutbacks for years as a teacher. The grass wasn’t much greener, though the state truly is beautiful and I was welcomed with open arms not only by my friends who had moved earlier, but the community of Sts. Peter and Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church in Boulder and Father Christodoulos, whose kindness shown to me at his monastery will not be forgotten. However, going back was a blessing, as I get to see the family I love, the friends I missed, and the nieces who I get to spoil a bit. Some business ventures with my friends Fr. Don, Mark, Steven and Mike in Kuwait look promising. I get to see Lily sometime in the early part of the year after 14 months of waiting (im)patiently. I promised myself a trip back to Macedonia to visit friends come hell or high water at some point in the year because 7 years is way too long to be away from dear comrades. Last year was hellish. Perhaps a new decade means a new hope, God willing.

A prosperous new year to all of you, friends and family. Let’s all get started on the good foot!