When Hamsters Murder & Kill

Err...


Oops! Haha look how nervous she got lol..

Hiding in the Shadows

Manama, 2012;

He ran quickly around the corner and rushed to hide in the shadows of a dark alley, just off the main road. The two policemen who had attempted to arrest him missed this, and kept running past into the night. He breathed a sigh of relief; this was a close one.

Just over an hour ago, he got an anonymous call asking to buy 2 kilos of his prime product. 2 full kilos. A good deal if there ever was one, but he should have been suspicious. The product he sold was pretty rare nowadays, and unfortunately with the recent police clampdown, buyers were hard to find. When a big opportunity strikes, however, the mind lays low.

The man on the other side of the phone spoke slowly, in a calm, deep voice;

"I need two kilos of your best stuff. I'll meet you in the alley next to Bab Al Bahrain in 45 minutes, just past midnight."
"Two kilos?"
"That's what I said."
"Okay, i'll be there"
"Click...."

He should have been suspicious. A while later he drove up past Bab Al Bahrain, parked his car away from the scene, and moved in the shadows. He carried two kilos with him; not exactly an amount of product you can carry discreetly, but he tried. He had wrapped the product in black plastic bags and newspapers, and dumped the whole thing into two large Geant shopping bags.

He walked in the shadows till he reached the meeting point, and there he glanced someone waiting in the dark. He walked closer, but was commanded to stop;

"Don't come any closer. Do you have it with you?"
"Yes. Two kilos worth."
"Let me see it."

He looked around to make sure no one was in the vicinity, and started to unwrap one of the packages; as he opened it up, he could smell its scent fill the area. The anonymous buyer stood in the shadows watching.

"How much.."
"Three hundred and fifty."

He had actually pushed his price up a little; mainly because of the rarity of his product, but also because the situation was a little shadier than usual, and he didn't even know this customer.

"Okay,"

said the voice in the shadows as he reached for the money from his pocket. But it wasn't money that he pulled out.

In a split second, the quiet midnight streets of the Souq were filled with screams on a two-way radio to capture the dealer, the screech of tires and wail of a police-car siren coming out from it's hideout, and the sounds of policemen running towards him with their batons.

His mind worked quickly. He had to leave his product behind; two kilos would only slow him down, so he turned around and jetted off into the shadows. He knew the back alleys of this area better than anyone else, growing up in the neighborhood as a child. He knew every corner and every turn, and banked on his childhood memory to save him from a lengthy jail sentence.

His memory served him well; as he heard the police footsteps running closer, he ran quickly around the corner and rushed to hide in the shadows of a dark alley, just off the main road. The two policemen who had attempted to arrest him missed this, and kept running past into the night. He breathed a sigh of relief; this was a close one.

Meanwhile, back at the sting scene, the police picked up the two kilos of pork to take in as evidence.

"Wow.. Have you ever seen this much pork in your life?"
"Damn pork dealers..."

----------------------------

MPs call for ban on pork
9 February 2009

EIGHT MPs are recommending two-month jail terms or fines of BD300, or both, for anyone in Bahrain who imports, sells or simply possesses pork.They are all members of the Al Asala bloc, which has already drafted amendments to Bahrain's Penal Code that would outlaw pork.

Now I gotta say guys, the scene with our friendly pork dealer above isn't as close as you might think to being fiction. I don't eat pork, and in reality the law wouldn't affect me personally in the least. However, it does affect freedoms in this country, which our MPs seem to think should be made as rare as pork in the above story. Last week, they tried to outlaw alcohol on Gulf Air flights (a frickin' international airline, for God's sake), and then tried to ban alcohol from everywhere in Bahrain. Again, doesn't affect me personally, but it's going to affect everything from tourism, to businesses, to restaurants, to the lot. Just because you're a religion freak with a Made-in-Taiwan Halo over your head doesn't mean you should play god. Banning something doesn't make people more religious; it makes them retaliate more. Pork isn't exactly available everywhere in Bahrain; just a few specific supermarkets, and a limited number of restaurants.

Oh, and this may shock you MP's, but the people who usually purchase pork AREN'T USUALLY MUSLIM. And even if they were, it's their goddamn choice whether they want to follow the religion, not yours. So get off our backs and start coming up with some resolutions that will actually benefit the country, like creating more jobs, help diversify the economy, and... Oh wait, I forgot, half of you guys don't have more than a school degree and have no idea what i'm talking about.

Bummer.

Vote ammaro for the next election.

The Real Reason Behind the Website Ban

Remember the Matrix? Remember how the whole world you lived in, which you believed was real, was in fact completely made up? Just a mirage?

That's probably what the internet is in Bahrain. The internet was all a mirage created by the Bahrain government, to let you think that you're connecting to the outside world, when in reality we are kept very isolated from everything and everyone else. All the sites you've ever visited were set up by creative individuals in the Ministry of Information; every single one. There's a guy who writes the CNN website, and makes up the world news, another guy who writes the BBC website. It's sort of obvious that they're sitting next to each other when doing this; the news is almost exactly the same on both sites...

Then there are the global forums; the government obviously pays people to sit all day and just reply under multiple nicknames, to give us Bahrainis an impression that we are talking to the outside world.

Google, Facebook, YouTube? Yup, you guessed it, all created here. Some of the videos are purchased from other countries and uploaded to the YouTube servers right next to the Bahrain TV studios.

This whole internet thing has been fabricated in Bahrain, in the back offices of Batelco by their chief engineers; it doesn't exist outside the country, it's all one big facade. Imagine leaving the country one day, flying to another country, checking into a hotel and asking if they have internet, only to be replied with the words: "Interwha'? What's that?"



We've been living a lie. The new website bans aren't really websites being 'blocked'. It's actually a side effect from the Global Credit Crunch, where the Ministry has had to fire a large number of employees because of a shortage of funds, and couldn't sustain as many websites as it used to. Therefore the ban.

Very simple.

Can't Hold Us Down

(following from my last post...)

The Ministry of Information has went from being a minor pain in the ass to just totally infuriatingly outrageous. Besides blocking politically affiliated sites, they've blocked proxy sites, translation services, art & culture websites, archives, and much more.

MINISTRY; HERE'S A SPECIAL MESSAGE FOR YOU. YOU CAN BLOCK A DOOR, YOU CAN BLOCK TWO, BUT YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO CENSOR THE INTERNET, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. THERE ARE A MILLION AND ONE WAYS TO GET AROUND YOUR BLOCKADES, AND YOU'LL NEVER KEEP UP WITH THEM. GET WITH THE PROGRAM.

Besides the numerous politically affiliated websites, proxy sites, as well as adult and gambling websites, there is a number of ridiculous bans we don't understand (Why?!?!?!?)

www.DeviantART.com (Art/Culture website)
www.Demonoid.com (Private torrent tracker)
www.askmen.com (Online Men's publication)
www.google.com/translate (Online translator)
www.allposters.com (posters site. WTF?)
www.4chan.org (imageboard service)


Want to read more about this? Here's a list of bloggers/newspaper articles dealing with the blockade.

English:
Yacoubs Dome
S as in Saudi
Silly Bahraini Girl
Gulf Daily News #1
Gulf Daily News #2
Another Day
Eyad
RedBelt
Al Singace
Ali Abdulemam

Arabic:
Suad
Marhoons
Ali7
Khalid Bahrain
Hayat

FaceBook Groups:
Article 19 of Decree Law 47!! :S
The website Ban in Bahrain is BULLSHIT
You may take our porn... But You will Never... Take... OUR FREEDOM!
The Ministry of Culture/Info Should Stop Blocking Websites

And i'm pretty sure there are a lot more out there. If you know any, add them in the comments below and i'll update the list. We won't stop till these stone-age minded big brother tactics are lifted.

Country of Disinformation

The Ministry of Information in Bahrain has never really done much of a great job; their role in the country is quite varied, dealing with the running of the Bahrain TV channels (which are still stuck in the 80's), the Bahrain radio stations (which usually feel more like amateur efforts than serious radio stations), to having a hand in everything that the has to do with the media, from magazines, newspapers, films, and the internet.

Being the Ministry of "Information", you would expect them to be knowledgeable about most things, especially those that they deal with.

Unfortunately, that isn't true.

A little over a week ago, the Ministry decided to come up with a directive for all internet providers in the country to block a number of websites (somewhere between 20-30 sites; i'm not sure of the exact number). These included a number of forums, blogs, and information websites, mainly because of their political content. Of course, even when a website is blocked, users can access it through anonymous browsing/proxy services. So oops, let's block those too. Oh and guess what, you can also enter any website address into Google Translate, and get a translated version of that page, bypassing any blocked content. So guess what? That gets blocked too.

Okay; so the Ministry want to block certain information from coming in. Last time I checked, we were living in the Information Age. Not the Industrial Age, not the Nuclear Age, not the sticks and stones age. THE INFORMATION AGE. Information will get through, whether you like it or not; if you block a website, there's a proxy. If you block a proxy, there's a million more proxies that are available. If you block every single one of those, there are services like Google Translate that will bypass the blocked sites. If you block those, there are a million other ways to get past blocked information; through blogs, through email, through new forums, through Facebook, through messages, through pure old photocopied papers, through SMS messages, through phone calls, through satellite TV channels, through gatherings in someones house, in a coffee shop,
etc...
etc..
etc.

There is no such thing as a complete block for information nowadays, and especially when it concerns the internet. Information is not a one way street, you can't block it and expect that people will give up and go to sleep. Nowadays, there is ALWAYS a way around it.

I'm really not for or against what is being blocked; I honestly couldn't care less about different peoples' political agendas. What I completely and 100% oppose is the restrictions of free speech, of which a law has recently been granted in Bahrain. And even then, this isn't what i'm here to talk about; my point is that you cant block the internet. But let's leave this on the side for now and go back to what's being blocked.

Google Translate?

ARE YOU FRICKIN' KIDDING ME?! This is probably one of the most useful tools on the internet today, giving us access to knowledge and information from all over the World! It gives us a chance to communicate with people from other parts of the globe, do commerce with people from other countries whose language we can't speak, and opens up a multitude of opportunities.

But nooooo... MOI decides it has to be blocked because you can bypass their blocked sites with it, which tells you one thing; it doesn't really bother them how many benefits something has, as long as it sparks one negative issue for them. This means there's no real limit to what they can block. What's next, Gmail? Hotmail? Facebook? MSN Messenger?

There are still a million other ways around the blocks, which renders their whole effort useless, just makes us more mad, and brings down the levels of freedom in this country. From the actions of the past few days, it's not really far-fetched that someone from the Ministry of Interior comes across my website, sees how i've put-down their whole blocking charade, and decide that ammaro.com needs to go too. (Speaking of which, if they do block my site, my posts are distributed by email, they're on feedburner, they're on BahrainBlogs, they're on Facebook, they're everywhere. Don't worry, you can still get your regular dosage of ammaroness; your world will not end.)

Just today I got a message; it seems they decided to start blocking anything with porn in it, as well as online gambling sites. Now that's just stupid; porn is everywhere, from downloading it on peer-to-peer networks, getting it through email, as well as satellite channels which every household has nowadays. And gambling? Well you could start by stopping that BD50 win-a-car lottery thing in the airport Duty Free, because if that isn't gambling, I don't know what is.

Ministry of Information; PLEASE WAKE UP.

(PS. Just to give you a sample of how BAD a job they're doing, even with trying to block sites, check this out:

Try going to http://google.com/translate, and you'll get a blocked site notice.

Want to bypass it? Then just go to http://translate.google.com/. Apparently their Head Blocker Engineer (blockhead?) doesn't realize that there are different forms of domain name that can lead you to the same website. Duh.)