A “Lib Dem” minister just told Sky News he was approving new nuclear power stations to promote green jobs. If anybody ever votes for these lying bastards again I shall be disconsolate.
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This is my favorite Easter song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFWzPiGHd_Y
Says it all, really…
…. and that was next month’s news. Here’s this month’s:
http://endthelie.com/2013/03/26/facebook-using-offline-purchase-history-to-target-ads/#axzz2Osw4e2hT
In relation to yesterday’s news that Obama has signed a bill protecting Monsanta and its genetically modified creations from federal court prosecution, it seems the bankers were way ahead of that little game.
http://dailybail.com/home/keiser-the-klairvoyant-to-light-up-big-screen-in-bailout-2.html
and here’s the video referred to; the relevant bit begins about 15.00 minutes in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IE7rHh4Arc
@Ben,
“but can someone tell me what the Easter Bunny and colored eggs have to do with jesus arising from his tomb?”
Nothing, Ben. Easter (like other Christian festivals) is a hijack of pagan (Spring) festivals.
“Ēostre is attested by Bede in his 8th-century work De temporum ratione, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent to the month of April) feasts were held in Eostre’s honor among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, but had died out by the time of his writing, replaced by the Christian “Paschal month” (a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus).” (wikipedia)
The bunnies and eggs relate to fecundity … Spring busting out all over, so to speak.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre#Jacob_Grimm.2C_.2AOstara.2C_and_Easter_customs
Happy Easter, everyone, if you celebrate it.
(another 9!)
@The Scourge :
““Doug, since you’re around, perhaps you could tell me if you’ve had the time yet to follow up on the posts I pointed out to you at your urgent request (you know, the posts that claimed President Chavez had been murdered)?”
To be quite honest Habbabkuk I can’t be arsed.
If a poster here claimed President Chavez had been murdered, rather than repeating news reports, name and shame the person as a conspiracy theorist and give them the chance to defend their views.”
*********
Fair enough, Dougie. But in that case,
1/. If you now can’t be “arsed” to read the posts in question, why were you so vociferous in asking me to provide the links?
2/. If you think it’s for me to dialogues directly with the posters who made those false claims, why did you stick your nose in in the first place?
Just admit it, you challenged me, I called your bluff and you blinked.
********
La vita è bella, life is good!
Happy Easter All
The Resurrection of Our Lord, Jesus Christ
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/resurrection1.html
Priest forgets the origin of Christianity –
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-priest-disciplined-after-claims-Jesus-never-existed-in-controversial-book-187717531.html
Ok,I own up, my bad, only four people clicked the David Duke video to greet sewage satanyahu on his “birthday”.
Habbakyk
desres
CE
Kempe
But of course.
So where is the tabloids usual hun noises, the use of the term nazi when it is obvious that the neo colonial fascists in Germany are running the judiciary in Munich?
Is it because they are of the same hue than the German press? maybe it does not fit into their immigration hysteria and their fear of foreigners, or is it due to them not being faxed.
Where are our politicians so eager for Turkey to join the EU, what have they to say to such blatant bias of the Turkish press?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-press-react-to-turkish-press-exclusion-from-neo-nazi-trial-a-891512.html
The Guardian has revealed how jobcentre staff are under orders to find any sanction to knock people off benefits.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Not many know what is about to happen on Monday: neither those about to be knocked down nor those sailing too high above them to notice. But historians will see it as the day that defines the Cameron government. An avalanche of benefit cuts will hit the same households over and over, with no official assessment of how far this £18bn reduction will send those who are already poor into beggary.
In his 2009 Hugo Young lecture, David Cameron spoke with apparent passion of the damage done by inequality: “We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it.” The wise saw the wolf beneath the sheepskin: sure enough, once in power, the language he and his ministers used to blame the poor for their plight was cruder and fiercer than in Thatcher’s day. You need to go back to Edwardian times to find ministers and commentators so viciously dismissing all on low incomes as cheats, idlers and drunks.
On BBC news, Iain Duncan Smith, confronted with irrefutable cases of hardship, said: “It’s about trying to get as many people as possible out of the welfare trap and into lives they can control themselves.” As the economist JK Galbraith observed: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
So far, public opinion seems alarmingly content with these cuts – but before we despair of human kindness, many can plead ignorance. The government relies on destitution staying silent and unseen, isolated in families with no collective voice. Dear Guardian reader, you know what’s happening because we report on the social security calamity almost daily, as you would expect.
Readers of the Mirror have been briefed this week, and the Independent covered the bedroom tax on its front page. But look back through this week’s Times, Telegraph, Mail and Sun to see how their readers are told nothing. They know a lot about immigrants. Sun readers were told the welfare bill is soaring out of control. They read a freak story of a woman refusing to take well-paid jobs to keep her children’s free university places.
Times readers learned at length of Tanni Grey-Thompson’s ordeal of hauling herself up 12 floors when her lift broke down, but only a very short story on her admirable campaign against cuts leaving disabled people £4,600 poorer. Telegraph readers were told “benefit claimants should be forced to seek extra work”, with a battery of stories against unfair budget treatment of stay-at-home mums suffering a “traditional families penalty”. The Bishop of Exeter pleaded their cause for tax relief, although surely he should be raising hell about the cuts?
People may read these papers to be protected from inconvenient facts about growing inequality and the catastrophic falling behind of the poor. The Brookings Institution reports that ever-worsening inequality will be “permanent” from now on. Most people would be alarmed at a never-ending widening of the gulf, if they knew. Most people want to believe the equal opportunities myth, but are easily comforted when told the poor are bad and the well-off deserving, so social justice prevails in this best of all possible worlds.
Here’s an interesting brief story in the Telegraph: a report that young children moving home three or more times suffer serious behaviour problems. Unfortunately, the Telegraph made no mention of the many families about to be uprooted and sent far from relatives, jobs and schools, into temporary accommodation and B&Bs, then moved on each time their rents rise. With virtually no takers for Cameron’s parenting class vouchers, it’s the government that needs lessons in child development.
No amount of IDS newspeak can turn the bedroom tax into a “spare bedroom subsidy”. Frank Field calls for social landlords to knock down walls or brick up rooms so people can keep their homes: it’s all a fraud, since IDS knows that 660,000 tenants with a spare room can never be found smaller properties, they will pay the extra or fall into debt and arrears until they are evicted. From Monday, most of the poorest get a new bill of an average £138 for council tax. Landlords expect mayhem when tenants are paid rent directly every month: pilots show many fall into debt.
Now add in these: disability living allowance starts converting into personal independence payment with a target to remove 500,000 people in new Atos medical tests. The Guardian has revealed how jobcentre staff are under orders to find any sanction to knock people off benefits. New obstacles are strewn in their path: people must apply for their benefits online from computers they don’t possess; many of these claimants are semi-literate. When in dire straits, there will be no more crisis loans, only a card for buying food, with not a penny for bus fares. Trussell Trust food banks expect a great surge of the hungry, so they ask everyone to donate the price of an Easter egg.
Here is the final wicked twist: legal aid has been removed for advice on benefits, housing, divorce, debt, education and employment. On Monday the budget of Citizens Advice for such cases falls from £22m to £3m. The few emergency cases still covered – families facing instant eviction – can only use a phone service, not face-to-face legal help. Law centres will close. There will be no help on school exclusions, landlord or employer harassment, or failure to pay wages.
Every new benefit system starts out with a high error rate: everyone knows the complex universal credit will leave millions with incorrect or no payments – and now, nowhere to go for help. Courts and tribunals expect chaos as people try to make their own cases without any help. Try to imagine the plight of people in debt because of the non-arrival of payments, with no credit on their phones to call and inquire, no crisis loan to buy phone credit, no internet access – and now no advice service either.
I refuse to believe most people would not be shocked if they knew, if they saw and if they understood. Even some of the 30% who always vote Tory might be appalled if they weren’t so well deceived by their ministers, MPs and newspapers, who lie knowingly and deliberately. People should know that historians will record the earthquake of social destruction that happened in their name, while they read of nothing but “scroungers” and the “soaring benefit bill”.
Toynbee
A lot of not so great changes hitting the poorest and the disabled, whilst millionaires get tax relief.
Thanks for that collation of views, Mark
“It’s about trying to get as many people as possible out of the welfare trap and into lives they can control themselves.”
This tin man has no heart and he has no idea what poverty really means, what does he know of feeding a family on £ 20/week? zilch.
I have had my nomination confirmed and shall now stand as an Independent here in Norfolk, together with many others.
Those of you still dithering, you have until next Friday to provide a choice of something different.
Just got mod’d from The Gruan. I was sympathetic to Miliband about the banana thing. It was just a banana, one may slaughter Dave for many things, but eating a banana in public appears to be a lesser-crime.
In fairness, I did mention a 1000-year Blair-reich. And then went on to observe that Blair was, and is, a borderline psychotic. I left the other, ah, Fettes-related allegations aside, which was kind of me. Still, curious how Blair is, to this day, basically above critique in media circles. I’m convinced, utterly, that he is a psychopath, and I’m not really prone to this kind of sweeping judgment. Thing is, this is observational and evidence based. It isn’t merely interwebs rumour. A reasonably intelligent person (I think I am) can look at his actions, his policies, the dissonence between his words and his actions, and his constant, utterly ruthless lies – and make a judgment. I’ve made mine, others may differ.
I guess the CiF team know where their careers end, and moderate accordingly. Such is life.
So Claes Borgström has thrown in the towel regarding Assange and Anna Ardin seeks new representation. It would be nice to think that the story we broke, Rafik Saley, Okoth Osewe and myself, concerning the connections of his legal firm with rendition to torture had something to do with it.
Although there is no case to answer for Assange they’ve dragged it out and persecuted the man relentlessly. It has not stopped yet. It is Good Friday and I have likened the persecutions of Assange and Manning to that of Jesus.
And, as it goes, one of my comments was Orwelled. Down the memory hole it goes. No longer exists on CiF.
Me? I’m just an internet clown. Deleting from existence my comment? That’s evil.
Brendan , rejoice, I’ve been banned for speaking out and linking to this blog, for over a year now. Thankfully they do not review their bans, they are for life I think.
Killer robots:
Sorry, I forgot the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/keller-smart-drones.html
OFF TOPIC – A WAY TO FEED THE WORLD – WATCH THE VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&feature=player_embedded
@ Brendan, re Blair :
In the light of your post, I think you might be interested in a book by former MP Leo Abse, who was also a qualified pyschiatrist (or psychologist) ; it’s called “Tony Blair – the man behind the smile” (or something very similar). An interesting read (written some time before the Iraq war, I believe).
And thanks to Mark Golding for his interesting and informative post.
It would be good if more of the posts on here were of that nature; firstly because they relate to matters which, because they are really in the hands of the govt., concerned citizens might actually be able to do something about as opposed to matters (eg, the use of drones) which neither they – or the govt. itself even if it felt so inclined – can do anything about. In other words, focus on the feasible.
And secondly, because they are not the normal mini-whinge about people or mini-events (Louise Mensch, whether David Milliband goes to work in the USA or not…) who/which are, when all’s said and done, of little real importance.
Hab a chwoi?
Kurdish for: would you like a paracetamol?
No seriously, I am very worried about your withdrawal symptoms, like a snake on a nature programme that’s been fixing its whole mind and concentration on a mouse, that disappears at the last moment.
Brendan
I don’t know for certain but I presume Mark Golding’s last contribution was quoted from Polly Toynbee of the Guardian. Tough hitting stuff to make us imagine that New Labour really cares. New Labour still think Blair is sellable, but there again some people still drive Rovers.
@ Kwa-Gwano says “No seriously,…”
Please try and show us, through more rational and to-the-point posts, written intelligibly, that you know the meaning of the word “serious”.
Thank you kindly.
Very good talk Courtenay. But it has a few problems.
The case studies presented all look great, but there is no accounting for local variability of climate in individual cases and no overall success rate given, just a selection of cases.
He claims oddly, that burning a hectare of grassland has the same carbon output as “6000” cars. To just throw a claim like out there, reveals a flaw which we would hope does not affect the overall message and conviction of the idea. What might he mean by the 6000 cars claim? I guess he might do something like calculate the average fuel consumed by 6000 cars in a day, or even in the few hours it takes to burn a hectare of grassland and equated them. Spoken without any explaination to an informal crowd, the claim is only confusing and/or misleading.
Also, the albido of deserts is basically much higher than grassland. (In an immediate respect deserts reflect more heat back into space than grassland) Without systematic complications desertification would be a negative feedback on climate. It may not be so, due to systematic effects such as possible reduction in cloud coverage, but the claims that desertification may be more responsible for climate change than (still constantly increasing) anthropogenic CO2 are very tenious and made very loosely.
Reclaiming desert is a great thing in its own right, it is quite demeaned by the suggestion that it is a substitute for other very well researched and reviewed advice on AGW
Mark @ 10 ; 36 am
Brilliant post… OMG i was gonna ask hou the Fk are they getting away with.. But of course you have answered that point..we get told nothing. its all utterly Shocking and Sickening.
Here’s another example of how we are told Nothing ( Nothing but B.Shit that it)
Marr’s utterly cowardly, Twisted Take on the fall of Baghdad. its got to be the most sinister Groveling piece propaganda new this country has ever seen…well done Marr, shithead.
Frankly, the main mood [in Downing Street] is of unbridled relief’, he began. ‘I’ve been watching ministers wander around with smiles like split watermelons.’ (BBC News At Ten, April 9, 2003)
The fact that Marr delivered this with his own happy smile was a portent of what was to come. Marr was asked to describe the significance of the fall of Baghdad. This is what he said:
‘Well, I think this does one thing – it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of… well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him – because they’re only human – for being right when they’ve been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead, as I said. But I think this is very, very important for him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He confronted many critics.
‘I don’t think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he’s somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.’ (Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5_JC371jxPI
“Fuel cells take those gases and generate energy by recombining them. Water is the only waste product. The cells are seen as a possible source of clean, reliable power that could be built on almost any scale required.
A leap toward efficient, affordable storage is what we need.
“Electrolyzers depend on rare, difficult-to-work-with and sometimes toxic metals, but the method developed by Chris Berlinguette and Simon Trudel uses metals as common as rust. It delivers results comparable to current techniques but costs about 1,000 times less.
That could make it easier to use hydrogen to store intermittent energy produced by renewable sources such as wind or solar generators — cheaper, more efficient and with fewer toxic materials than the batteries currently used.”
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/energy/Fuel cell breakthrough claimed Canadian researchers/8165603/story.html?__lsa=1db9-ed19#ixzz2Oxz0NGIK
“A new survey commissioned by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to prepare in order to minimize the damage likely to be caused by global warming-induced sea-level rise and storms. A majority also want people whose properties and businesses are located in hazard areas – not the government – to foot the bill for this preparation. Specifically, 82 percent of the Americans surveyed said that people and organizations should prepare for the damage likely to be caused by sea level rise and storms, rather than simply deal with the damage after it happens. Among the most popular policy solutions identified in the survey are strengthening building codes for how to build new structures along the coast to minimize damage (favored by 62 percent) and preventing new buildings from being built near the coast (supported by 51
percent).”
http://woods.stanford.edu/news-events/news/americans-back-preparation-extreme-weather-and-sea-level-rise
Superstorm Sandy was the Paul Revere for climate change. Aside from the late prep, it’s good news that people don’t see economic distress from preparations. The average person is beginning to see things, and I find it encouraging.
@Ben
A fuel cell which has been blocked by the forces of Awe and Boredom
Interesting story about it on on Youtube.
Link text
The website
Link text
Ooop`s sorry about previous
@Ben
A fuel cell which has been blocked by the forces of Awe and Bordem
Interesting story on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6D8CP2xNi8
The website
http://www.metalectrique.co.uk/
Crab,
In response:-
1. “The case studies presented all look great, but there is no accounting for local variability of climate in individual cases and no overall success rate given, just a selection of cases.
2. He claims oddly, that burning a hectare of grassland has the same carbon output as “6000″ cars. To just throw a claim like out there, reveals a flaw which we would hope does not affect the overall message and conviction of the idea.”
As regards 1 above:-
I don’t have such details, save and except what he presented. You may very well have a point, but I am not sure it is a strong one. Since the evidence presented was in fact global, then the variabilities to which you refer are belied by the global references and results – surely?
As regards 2 above:-
You probably have your stronger point here.
CB
UK Guardian Series on Torture and Death Squads in Iraq March 6 and March 26 2013 articles
The Neocon’s use of recycled Iran Contra veterans in the Bush II administration was no surprise
I have followed Steele’s career for over 25 years
http://www.scribd.com/doc/131505903/UK-Guardian-Series-on-James-Steele-Torture-in-Iraq-March-6-2013
More information on the Bush Administration policy on torture
http://www.powderburns.org/negroponte.html
Symptoms:
Dead bodies found bound in police handcuffs – indicating they died in custody
Heads missing (optional)
Cigarette burn marks on the back in the same pattern- lower back region
Power Drill holes on the heads of the victims
The pattern repeats itself every ten years or so when a hotspot regional conflict flares up.
Laos, El Salvador, Iraq.