"Italy's government has rushed through a decree [that] sets rules for citizen street patrols, in which officials said [sic] retired police and soldiers would play a major role."
"Critics say the measures could effectively legitimise vigilantism and xenophobia."Clearly, not all Italians. But it has to be getting towards a majority after they re-elected Berlusconi.
"Israel's recent actions constitute, under Article 147 of the Fourth [Geneva] Convention, as well as Article 85 of Protocol I and Article 8 of the Rome Statute, grave breaches of international law which entail individual criminal responsibility."
"Many governments, ignoring the lessons of history, have allowed themselves to be rushed into hasty responses to terrorism that have undermined cherished values and violated human rights.
The result is a serious threat to the integrity of the international human rights legal framework."
Word.
In other news, Thabo Mbeki's health policies based on his belief that AIDS was not caused by the HIV virus, is thought to have been the direct cause of 300,000 deaths due to his rejection of offers of funding and free antiretroviral drugs."Why should I resign? I fulfil all my ministerial obligations in all areas of my department, and the idea that I should resign just because I hold a different view from other people on what is a very controversial topic is nonsense. And it just shows the intolerance of these people if they think I should resign because I have a different opinion."
"If climate change is “a greater threat than terrorism,” should governments criminalize “the gloriļ¬cation of travel” and pass laws against“advocating acts of consumption”?"
"Heathrow will now be a running story, sapping ministerial energy and attention. That is why the whole affair is misjudged. It is not as if the rest of Britain's transport problems are resolved and we have the luxury of moving on. The railways remain an overpriced and chaotic disgrace. Over Christmas we took a sleeper from Euston to Fort William in Scotland. We were kicked out at 3am in Edinburgh because the train was defective. On the way back there was chaos from Glasgow station with Scotrail officials having no idea what Virgin trains were doing. The fragmented monopolies are not delivering. Sorting out the railways is where the intense ministerial focus should be, for economic reasons as well as quality of life ones."
"Putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles, and transmission lines would not only create jobs but also reduce costs due to healthcare, crop damage, and climate damage – as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power,"
"Ten of the 15 seats on the U.N. Security Council are held by rotating members serving two-year terms. We find that a country's U.S. aid increases by 59 percent and its U.N. aid by 8 percent when it rotates onto the council. This effect increases during years in which key diplomatic events take place (when members' votes should be especially valuable), and the timing of the effect closely tracks a country's election to, and exit from, the council. Finally, the U.N. results appear to be driven by UNICEF, an organization over which the United States has historically exerted great control."
"Reaffirms the importance of the exercise by the Security Council of its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and the duty of the permanent members to seek unanimity and to exercise restraint in the use of the veto," ...
"Recognises in particular that such failure does not deprive the General Assembly of its rights or relieve it of its responsibilities under the Charter in regard to the maintenance of international peace and security," ...
"Resolves that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security."
". . . the situation in the current capitalist system whereby much of the surplus labour appropriated by capitalists and shareholders ends up unable to find genuine investment opportunities because workers whose surplus labour has been appropriated do not earn enough to provide a sufficient market for the goods or services that would have been produced or supplied. In other words, much of the capital derived from the surplus labour that people have performed ends up not being invested at all – at least not in any meaningful economic sense, in new productive activities. Indeed, this is the primary cause of the world’s current economic crisis – too much capital accumulating at the expense of wages and growth of economic demand."
"Last year saw the first handful of prototype robotic exoskeletons go on sale to the public – with the most advanced being the full-body HAL robot suit made by Japanese firm Cyberdyne."(emphasis is mine)
Well I hope you find your way
Through every heart wrenching day
With all those shitty decisions that you make
Hell I know the games, I know the games you play
So do you think you got enough time
To open all of your uranium mines
Before yes you go and you poison us all
You know your profit man it's gonna take its toll
And I don't know who you are
I don't know where you come from
I just know it is to hell you're going cos
You pollute everything with you big business
And i know it's all for your money
Hell yeah, all for your money
All for your money
Tell me man it's all for your money
So go now you go and you rape this Earth
You take her for what you think she'd worth
But you take and you take and you
take til there's nothing left
I don't call that business, I call that theft
So who do the Hell do you think you are
Why do you got to take things so far
You know you screw the Earth and then
you look towards the stars
Tell me man why do you got to take things so far
And I don't know who you are
I don't know where you come from
I just know it is to hell you're going cos
You ruin everything with you big business
And i know it's all for your money
All for your money
Sweeter than honey
All for your Money
Tell me man can you eat your money
Tell me man can you eat your money
Cos that's what's gonna be left,
that's what's gonna be left
So tell me man can you eat your money
Business man with your uranium mine,
will you gain a conscience
Politician man, there in your Government,
will you gain a conscience
Media man with all your newspapers,
Who lies must gain a conscience
Prime Minister with all our apathy,
will you GAIN A CONSCIENCE!
Fire in the sky
out of the blue
and into the red depths,
Time for you and I
to try and fall asleep
in the bed they've made us,
All came crumbl'n down
tears in our eyes
as it rained confusion
the whole world has changed
I don’t understand
how one can kill a man
in the name peace,
that’s ridiculous
They say eye for an eye
so they fire from the sky
and they come out of nowhere
Time for you and I
to turn on the big screen
see what’s happnen'
And as those children die,
pawns in the game of
collateral damage,
The whole world goes mad
Standing here on quick sand,
the more we fight we sink
And vengeance gives us hope,
at least that what we think,
at least that what we think cause
As we make amends by
getting our revenge,
We sort nothing out,
just add to the doubt
and with God on both sides,
if death is justified,
whatever the name,
then we're all to blame
so as the spirits fly,
to honor those who've past,
we've got to get along,
while the time still last
Bury the hatchet deep
so we all can weep
and heal all this pain
so,so we can live again,
so,so we can live again 'cos
as we make amends by
getting our revenge,
We sort nothing out,
just add to the doubt
and God on both sides,
if death is justified,
whatever the name,
then we're all to blame
But I don’t understand
how one can kill a man
in the name peace,
that’s ridiculous
But I understand
that I will defend
my family from
both sides of misery
"(Yet) here, you've got agencies, you've got organisations that are not only responsible for their own failure but the failure of the entire economic system, and they get cheques worth 2.7 trillion dollars. I find this amazing... What can you say, what can you do?"
"when the US and some other countries gave a trillion-dollars-and-still-counting in low-interest loans and other subsidies to their own banks, it constituted just the kind of unfair competition and non-tariff barriers to trade that they were busy condemning at the G-20 meeting"
"No British nuclear power station has ever been built to budget. The last one, Sizewell B, cost more than twice the estimate. The first of the new generation stations, Olkiluoto in Finland, found itself more than a billion pounds over budget and two years behind schedule at only two and a half years into construction.
Even with the taxpayer coughing up for a load of British Energy's debts, it couldn't stay afloat on its own. In 2002, just six years after privatisation, the government bailed it out with over £5bn of taxpayer's money.
These days, our government assures us that the owners will pay for all the decommissioning. They are lying. In order to get the industry and investors to sign up, the government agrees a set maximum price for waste disposal and decommissioning when it gives approval for the station. Any over-runs in cost (and when has the nuclear industry not delivered those?) will be paid for by the taxpayer."
"Clearly, the arms industry has lost much of its privileged access but the business remains the same: promoting arms exports. [The UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation (the DESO's replacement)] is offering to take UK arms companies ‘under its wing’ this November at IDEAS Pakistan, an arms fair operating under the slogan ‘arms for peace’, which has previously hosted delegations from North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe, Iran, Sudan, China and Indonesia."
"I was reading the posts and then came accross this piece of filth:
http://punkscientist.blogspot.com etc
I do so hope that anyone offended by this ignorant piece of garbage hiding behind blogger dot com will press the "flag blog" button at the top of the site - I am sure Google's TOS has something to say about the crudity of language even if the crudity of its mental process is allowed through their filth filter.
Press the "flag blog" button often enough and this POS will have to wipe his mouth elsewhere."
"If we had those forty million [aborted] children that were killed over the last thirty years we wouldn't need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today."
my new fighting technique is unstoppable
"Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust. When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her nakedness, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister. Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."
News is a procession of the powerful. Watch it on TV, listen to the Today programme and marvel at the orthodoxy of views and the lack of critical voices. When the credit crunch hit, we were given a succession of bankers, stockbrokers and even hedge-fund managers to explain and say what should be done. But these were the people who had caused the problem, thinking nothing of taking £20 billion a year in city bonuses. The solution these free market wizards agreed to, was that tax payers should stump up £50 billion (and rising) to fill up the black holes in the banking system. Where were the critical voices to say it would be a better idea to take the bonuses back? Mainstream news has sometimes a social-democratic edge. There are complaints aired about fuel poverty and the state of inner cities. But there are precious few voices making the point that the reason why there are so many poor people is because the rich have taken the bulk of the disposable wealth. The notion that the people should own the nation’s resources is close to derided on orthodox news.
When Northern Rock was nationalised, TV news showed us pictures of British Leyland and the old problem ridden car industry. Never mind that it was actually privately owned when most of the problems occurred and that company policy had been to distribute 95% of profits as dividends to shareholders, rather than to invest in new plant and machinery. This is all lost in the mists of history and what is conveyed is the vague sense that nationalisation is a “bad thing”.
We showed how this affects public understanding by asking a sample of 244 young people in higher education (aged 18 –23) about the great spate of privatizations which had taken place in the 1980s. We asked whether the industries involved had in general been profitable or unprofitable. Actually, the major ones of gas, electricity, oil and telecommunications were both profitable and major sources of revenue to the state, but nearly 60% of the sample thought that the industries had been losing money.
This is especially poignant now that energy prices are being jacked up and the foreign owners of many of these companies are not interested in passing on their windfall profits to the British people. Countries such as China, Venezuala and even Russia keep key industries very firmly in state hands, but where are the critical voices in broadcasting here, who are given space to raise these arguments? They can be heard in the outer reaches, occasionally on Question Time, Channel 4 News or Newsnight.
But is this what the population want? At the start of the Iraq war we had the normal parade of generals and military experts, but in fact, a consistent body of opinion then and since has been completely opposed to it. We asked our sample whether people such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Naomi Klein and Michael Moore should be featured routinely on the news as part of a normal range of opinion. Seventy three per cent opted for this rather than wanting them on just occasionally, as at present.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is another area of great imbalance in the views that are heard. Our study of the main TV news output showed that pro-Israeli speakers were featured about twice as much as Palestinians. This year BBC News covered Israel’s ‘birthday’ of 60 years since the setting up of the state. This was of course also the anniversary of what, from the Palestinian perspective, was the great disaster when they were forced from their homes and land. Israel’s superior public relations machine meant that they set the agenda on broadcast news. The Palestinians were featured, but rather less and as a sort of afterthought. As a presenter on BBC’s Today programme put it, “Today Israel is 60 years old, and all this week we have been hearing from Israelis about what it means to them”. Quite so.
We commissioned YouGov to ask a sample of 2086 UK adults whether they thought that more coverage should be given to the Israeli point of view, or more to the Palestinians, or equal for both. Nearly twice as many people thought that the Palestinians should have the most as compared with the Israelis, but the bulk of the replies (72%) were that both should have the same. Only 5% of the population supported what the broadcasters have actually been doing in the main news output.
Politicians and broadcasters say they are worried about a growing lack of interest in politics especially amongst the young. Our work shows there is no lack of interest in lively critical debate. The problem is that a news which largely features the views of two political parties with very similar free market policies at home, and an international agenda which follows America, does not provide this.
- Teenagers who have pledged themselves to an abstinence program are 28 percent more likely to try drugs.
- Among American adults who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design, 14.6 percent believe the Bible was originally written in english.
"diatom algae needs silicon in the water to grow, whereas green algae requires nitrogen to grow. Under nutrient deficiency the algae produced more oils per weight of algae, however the algae growths also were significantly less."
"As humanity teeters on the brink, the corporate media are sure to give increasing coverage to these dubious and risky "technofixes." Influential business lobbyists will make ever-greater efforts to push for lucrative, but diversionary, "solutions" to climate chaos. We need to be alert to such self-serving manoeuvres and willing to expose them.
This much is clear: after more than twenty years of ever more urgent scientific warnings, and government and corporate obstructionism, we really have arrived at the edge of the climate abyss."
There's even a step-by-step guide online to dismantling them! A couple of googles later and I had located a vendor for a replacement screen for the princely sum of £12.50, including p&p. So now I am replete with a fully functioning mobile for a fraction of the price of a replacement!
Duct tape is like 'The Force'. It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
-Anon
11 If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, 12you shall cut off her hand; show no pity.
"The problem is not below ground, the problem is above ground," Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said at an oil and gas conference in Malaysia." (my bold)
