September 2008
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
« Aug   Oct »
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

Month September 2008

Entries 10 Total

Israel/Palestine: The future is one nation

Sep 29, ’08 9:33 PM

Out­go­ing Prime Min­is­ter of Israel, Ehud Olmert, recently quoted as saying:

(I am say­ing) what no pre­vi­ous Israeli leader has ever said: we should with­draw from almost all of the ter­rit­or­ies, includ­ing in East Jer­u­s­alem and in the Golan Heights.

Palestinian For­eign Min­is­ter Riyad al-Malki, in response:

We wish we had heard this per­sonal opin­ion … (before) he resigned.

No shit. But this all pre-supposes the dead end that is the two-state solu­tion. As Ghada Karmi wrote last week in The Guardian:

A unit­ary state is inev­it­able. Estab­lish­ing an exclus­ive state defined along ethnic-religious lines and exclud­ing its pre­vi­ous inhab­it­ants was unjust and ulti­mately unsus­tain­able. No polit­ical acro­bat­ics will alter this. The sooner the UN, which unwisely cre­ated Israel in the first place, takes charge of the con­sequences, the bet­ter it will be for Palestini­ans, for Israelis and for the region as a whole.

Comments (0)

Once in a century rip-off

Sep 28, ’08 12:48 PM

Inter­view with eco­nom­ist Dr. Michael Hud­son on the pro­posed $700 bil­lion heist in the U.S.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Not so much maverick as bullshitter

Sep 28, ’08 11:37 AM

He calls him­self a mav­er­ick, but he’s just a bull­shit­ter (via one­good­move).

Comments (0)

We’re all fucked…

Sep 25, ’08 10:23 PM

This, pre­sum­ably, is why they’ve been try­ing to keep her away from the media.

Comments (0)

Your Urgent Help Needed

Sep 25, ’08 7:19 PM

Some­times noth­ing explains cur­rent events like satire: Your Urgent Help Needed.

Comments (0)

Bush invokes UN Charter

Sep 23, ’08 10:12 PM

Bush Junior at today’s UN meet­ing invok­ing, I kid you not, the UN Charter:

The United Nations charter sets forth the equal rights of nations large and small. Russia’s inva­sion of Geor­gia was a viol­a­tion of those words.

Bwahhh… haha! He’s not ser­i­ously sug­gest­ing that UN bol­locks about justice means any­thing these days is he?

Comments (0)

The methane tipping point?

Sep 23, ’08 8:42 AM

A rather unset­tling story from the Inde­pend­ent today:

The first evid­ence that mil­lions of tons of a green­house gas 20 times more potent than car­bon diox­ide is being released into the atmo­sphere from beneath the Arc­tic seabed has been dis­covered by scientists.

The Inde­pend­ent has been passed details of pre­lim­in­ary find­ings sug­gest­ing that massive depos­its of sub-sea meth­ane are bub­bling to the sur­face as the Arc­tic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Under­ground stores of meth­ane are import­ant because sci­ent­ists believe their sud­den release has in the past been respons­ible for rapid increases in global tem­per­at­ures, dra­matic changes to the cli­mate, and even the mass extinc­tion of species.

I find it incred­ible that we’ve allowed ourselves to get to this point while con­tinu­ing to use the same bank­rupt ideas, the same lead­er­ship and the same greed-fueled eco­nomic sys­tem that got us here in the first place.

Comments (0)

Capitalism’s true colours

Sep 22, ’08 10:31 PM

U.S. Sen­ator Bernie Sanders:

For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford — that the gov­ern­ment provid­ing health­care to all people is just unima­gin­able; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infra­struc­ture. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sud­den, yeah, we do have $700 bil­lion for a bail­out of Wall Street.

Schnews:

For years we heard the same old story about how there’s never any money for a live­able bene­fits sys­tem or a decent min­imum wage, but some­how UK plc finds bil­lions of spare cash to sup­port cor­rupt busi­nesses that are in a mess only because of a greed that has benefited no one but their share­hold­ers. For years we’ve heard the man­tra that the free mar­ket must be allowed to run unfettered – yet the most ‘cap­it­al­ist’ gov­ern­ments are nation­al­ising huge com­pan­ies left, right and centre. It just goes to show that cap­it­al­ism is a myth and the sooner we stop wast­ing money prop­ping up a failed sys­tem that will never work — the better.

Comments (1)

Inside the vaccine-and-autism scare

Sep 22, ’08 7:58 PM

A pedi­at­ri­cian traces the rise of the anti-vaccine move­ment that falsely linked thi­merosal with aut­ism and turned par­ents away from the most lifesav­ing medi­cine in history.

Wakefield’s research was secretly bank­rolled by a per­sonal injury law­yer whose cli­ents were suing MMR makers. Wake­field him­self was given close to a mil­lion dol­lars to prove that the MMR caused aut­ism. He had filed a pat­ent for a new MMR vac­cine at the same time he was doing his research. Upon learn­ing this, Lan­cet retrac­ted his paper, and he was charged with pro­fes­sional mis­con­duct in 2005. If he is found guilty of mis­con­duct, he will never prac­tice medi­cine in the U.K. again.

The last nail in the coffin came in 2007 … Wakefield’s former research assist­ant test­i­fied that his dis­cov­ery about the MMR vac­cine was, in real­ity, the res­ult of con­tam­in­ated lab equip­ment and that Wake­field knew this about but ignored it. In other words, as Offit writes, “Wake­field had crossed the line from ill-conceived, poorly per­formed sci­ence to fraud.”

Eleven stud­ies now show that the MMR vac­cine doesn’t cause aut­ism (the most recent just came out). Six have shown that thi­merosal doesn’t cause aut­ism; three have shown thi­merosal doesn’t cause neur­o­lo­gical prob­lems. Stud­ies show­ing the oppos­ite, like Wakefield’s, use flawed meth­ods, have ser­i­ous con­flicts of interest or have been con­duc­ted in anim­als whose res­ults can’t be extra­pol­ated to humans.

Comments (0)

God’s chosen people…

Sep 14, ’08 10:46 PM

Here’s recent recent foot­age of the Israeli navy fir­ing machine guns at unarmed Palestinian fish­ing boats.

The Sunday Her­ald reports (webpage removed):

The foot­age, taken on Septem­ber 6 by Andrew Muncie, who is from the High­lands, shows an Israeli gun­boat enga­ging fish­ing boats while inter­na­tional observ­ers hold their arms in the air and scream for them to stop firing.

No-one was injured in the incid­ent, but Palestinian fish­er­men claim 14 col­leagues have been murdered at sea by the Israeli navy since the onset of an eco­nomic block­ade imposed after Hamas took con­trol of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Israel says patrolling these waters is a vital secur­ity meas­ure to stop weapons being smuggled into Gaza.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)